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For what it is, “Insurgent” is a reasonably executed, sporadically enjoyable installment in the projected four-part “Divergent” series, based on the novels by Veronica Roth. Yet, there’s no escaping what it is, and what it is … is silly.

The best thing to say for the film, and this is no small thing, is that “Insurgent” moves the story forward significantly. Even “The Two Towers,” in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, suffered from middle-bookitis, a condition in which a story neither begins nor ends and thus leaves audiences unsatisfied. But “Insurgent” lands with a real sense of completion, with one grand movement concluded and another about to begin.

That dystopian visions of the future keep turning up on screen these days probably says something about how people feel about the present, but the “Divergent” series seems less like a futuristic nightmare than a metaphor for high school. The central idea is that, 200 years from now, in some blasted-out ruin of Chicago — at least they left New York alone, for once — humanity has devised a rigid but functional way to keep the peace. It divides human beings into five groups, based on personality type, and each group lives in a separate enclave.

The groups are Erudite (intellectuals), Abnegation (selfless individuals), Dauntless (warriors), Amity (peace lovers) and Candor (honest people). People who are “Divergent” have elements of all types and are considered dangerous. Others, who fail to pass entrance training for one of the factions are the Factionless, and they live lives of poverty and violence.

As a high school metaphor, this makes some kind of sense, the notion that there are jocks and nerds and hippies and people into student government, but that some of the most promising kids don’t fit in anywhere.

But to extrapolate from this into some grand vision of a future society is absurd on its face. For one thing, dividing people into self-contained factions is a recipe for conflict, not cooperation. Furthermore, the idea that people with similar personalities will get along harmoniously contradicts what we all know. People with similar personalities often bang heads.

Finally, nobody is one thing. Everybody is “divergent,” so the idea, repeated again and again, that divergent people are a special breed, is a little ridiculous. In fact, just about everything in “Insurgent” is ridiculous, and the more the movie expands to show how the Candor people live and how the hippie-dippy Amity dwellers get along, the harder it is to keep from groaning.

Faced with this, the actors and filmmakers do the one thing they can do. They commit to this world vision with religious intensity. “Insurgent” begins where “Divergent” left off. Tris (Shailene Woodley), her handsome boyfriend and fellow warrior Four (Theo James), and a group of their associates are on the run from the power mad Erudite ruler (Kate Winslet), who wants to restore order by killing all the Divergents. But Tris wants to do more than survive. She wants to lead the revolution.

If you want to make a million dollars, write a teen novel in which a seemingly unremarkable teenage girl becomes the romantic obsession of an insanely handsome young man. (If you want to make a billion dollars, give her two insanely handsome young men, as in the “Twilight” series.) Like Bella, Tris is just awesome, but at least Woodley makes you half-believe it, with her unclouded aura. Looking at her is like looking into clear water.

Much of the screen time in “Insurgent” is taken up with politics, the efforts of Tris and Four to forge alliances and launch a coup, but this makes for flat viewing. The world of the film is so far-fetched that the mechanics of its functioning are of no interest. What’s worse, the behavior of the characters often goes against the movie’s own internal logic, which is flimsy to begin with.

Robert Schwentke brings a kind of brain-dead intensity to the calmer scenes, a passionate fervor that admits no variety of humor, except the unintentional. But he does much better in the big virtual sequences, in which we see what Tris imagines, as she is hooked up to a simulator. These are the best scenes in the movie, its one claim to, if not originality, idiosyncrasy, and it really helps “Insurgent” that the climactic sequence leans heavily in this virtual direction.

“Insurgent” would be a much worse movie if the good parts were all at the beginning. But they are saved for the end, and they leave the viewer with a feeling of, “Well, that was OK,” even though most of it wasn’t.

— Mick LaSalle is a film critic for The San Francisco Chronicle.