Insurgent (2014, PG-13)

I’m still trying to decide what I think of Insurgent.  While the first movie in the franchised diverged moderately from the book (see what I did there?), the second installment veers off pretty substantially.  The characters and story move to the same places, but the routes they take to get there are very different.  Good different or bad different?  Some of each, truth be told, and the big question is, which is more prominent?

As in the book, Tris and her cohorts are on the run from the Erudite leaders out for Divergent blood.  Jeanine, the head of Erudite, wants Tris for a secret project, but whereas Book!Jeanine needs a lab rat on which to test Divergent-proof serums, Movie!Jeanine has a super-special MacGuffin (sort of) box that contains vital information and can only be opened by a perfect Divergent.  The plot here is a bit more focused and streamlined, but what it gains in coherency, it loses in a fair amount of character shading.

Not that the movie is without character development.  The added plot elements offer some pretty neat insights into Tris, and some important points – like her guilt and post-traumatic stress over the events of the first movie – are maintained.  I think Four comes across better in the movie, and the film takes advantage of Miles Teller’s post-Whiplash profile to expand on Peter’s character.  However, we don’t get much into the theme of Tris’s goals and ideas going against the plans of her faction, seeing Tris wrestling with following Dauntless or doing what she thinks is right.  And while the PTSD is included, chiefly in her nightmares and some of the MacGuffin-box-induced simulations, the film completely ignores Tris’s fear/reticence of handling guns after what happens to her in Divergent. 

And of course, most of the supporting characters are glorified window dressing, if that.  As Amity leader Joanna, Octavia Spencer has shockingly little to do, and the awesome Daniel Dae Kim does what he can to bring Candor leader Jack to life with his limited screentime.  Some Dauntless members who were left out of the first film, notably Uriah and Lynn, are introduced here, and while the young actors do a fine job capturing the characters, the screenplay offers little sense of who they are and what their inner lives might involve.  Finally, I know I mentioned Maggie Q’s Tori in my Divergent review, and I still love her, but why did they go to the trouble of casting Maggie Q if they were going to excise Tori’s entire plot?  At least she had Tris’s testing in the first movie; here, she hardly has more to do than any other Dauntless member.  Boo!

Just in general, this movie feels a little tighter, a little more purposeful, than Divergent.  Some sloppiness from the book gets tidied up, the conflict between Tris and Jeanine gets central focus, and some of the fighting is pretty excellent – there’s a long combat sequence on a train that’s terrific.  Additionally, Tris’s dreams and simulations, which I already mentioned, are all fantastically rendered.  They look great, and the simulations are especially cool (well thought-out, too, which is obviously a big plus.)

Warnings

Violence, freaky images, light sexual content, swearing, and thematic elements.

Insurgent (2012)

The second book in the Divergent series improves on its predecessor in some places and stumbles in others.  Overall, it’s a strong follow-up; it builds on the setup from Divergent and prepares us for the big finale of Allegiant.  As I was reading, I came across plenty of scenes that made me pretty excited for the upcoming movie.  (Spoilers for both Divergent and Insurgent are unavoidable.)

After the events of the first book, both of Tris’s lives – the simple one she lived with her family in Abnegation and the thrilling new one she forged for herself in Dauntless – are gone.  The surviving Abnegation members hide out as refugees, and Dauntless members who haven’t joined forces with the despotic Erudite are on the run.  Tris’s world has been teetering on the brink of revolution, and it’s finally hit.  Her life is now a war:  for survival, for retribution, for truth, and for liberation.  This war takes her all over the city, into and out of different factions as she searches for allies and answers.

The biggest plus of Insurgent is the expanded view we get of the world of the series.  We follow Tris into all the different faction communities and learn a lot more about how each one functions.  We see the various factions’ values, customs, and dangers, and it’s really interesting to explore the peculiarities that crop up when an entire subsection of society devotes itself to a single virtue.  Additionally, more is revealed about Divergence, the world at large, and the secrets at the center of everything.

I also really like the way Tris’s experiences in Divergent continue to resonate throughout Insurgent.  They influence her choices and the way she looks at people, and she reconciles everything she thought she knew with what she’s learned.  Although she’s undoubtedly brave and determined, she’s been traumatized as well, and she can’t just brush that off.  Her damage paralyzes her at critical moments and keeps her up at night turning over what she should have done differently.  The book does a nice job showing how, despite powering through and forcing herself to keep fighting, the things she’s had to do are massive, and they have a major effect on her.

Plot-wise, I feel like Insurgent isn’t quite as tight as book one.  It feels a little more aimless, spinning its wheels from time to time.  A good chunk of that is intentional, since Tris and many of the other characters are at a loss and trying to regain their bearings – I mean, come on, their entire society is going up in smoke.  However, it still results in some uneventful time-killing that’s a bit tedious to get through.  Plus, it might just be me, but the way certain characters handle the big secrets in the series are flat-out insufferable.  It’s that infuriating situation where a character says, “I have so much important information that people are willing to kill for and nothing is more important than getting this information out and your life will never be the same after learning this information!!!  But I can’t tell you the information.”  Talk about a prick-tease; I didn’t know how long I could take that.

I will say that we (finally!) get to the big reveal by the end of the book, and while it still seems unfair to keep us on the hook for so long, it doesn’t come off as anticlimactic.  My foremost thought when I finished reading was, “Allegiant is gonna be insane!”