21 Mar 2015

Insurgent Review

Insurgent appears to be the story of a girl who lives in a world made entirely of giant windows who is determined to lead a revolution by jumping through panes of glass at every opportunity.
"Insurgent" is the second film in the series inspired by the book by Veronica Roth



This installment in the series has been significantly re-engineered from the book by screenwriters Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback, and it suffers from middle movie syndrome in a major way. The entire film boils down to "There's a magic box, and only the Chosen One can open it, and the bad guy makes the Chosen One open it." And in this particular case, the bad guy (Kate Winslet, who I thought was the first movie's weak link), this manifestation of ultimate evil who our hero wants to kill, is named Jeanine. This leads to conversations where we have Shailene Woodley in a pixie cut snarling, "I want to kill Jeanine." It's hard not to read this as high camp, and it's not the most threatening variation on the archetype I've ever seen. The box that everything hinges on is about as uninteresting a plot device as we'll see in one of these. Of course it takes a Divergent to open this magic box. And of course it takes one particular Divergent to open this magic box. And of course there's all this personal soap opera playing out around Tris (Shailene Woodley), the Divergent who everything depends on. The first film was full of lots of training sequences, and this film is full of lots of running and lots of tests. It is all played as if it's very important, and one of the things I find most interesting is how committed the cast is, no matter how ridiculous things get.
Visually average no matter how seriously it tries to play things straight.