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Shailene Woodley channels her inner Jennifer Lawrence
C-The best praise I can give Insurgent, the sequel to last year’s modest YA science fiction success, Divergent, is to note that it doesn’t merely recycle the same plot points as its predecessor. Unfortunately, the producers seem to have exhausted their store of fresh ideas in the first movie and are reduced to ripping off other movies like The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Hellraiser instead.
The storyline of Insurgent picks up a few months after Divergent ended. In a dystopian future, residents of what’s left of Chicago live behind massive walls and are divided into five factions based on their predispositions. However, a few, like Tris (Shailene Woodley), are “divergents,” possessing aptitudes for multiple factions. The de facto ruler of the society, Jeanine (Kate Winslet), is trying to hunt down Tris and the other divergents. In the meantime, Tris and her boyfriend Four (Theo James) form an uneasy alliance with Four’s mother Evelyn (Naomi Watts), leader of the homeless Factionless, who wants to bring down Jeanine.
YA science fiction concepts generally aren’t all that complex to begin with, and Insurgent abandons most of the intricacies found in Divergent. Instead, what emerges is yet another story of a fascistic ruling élite and their storm trooper lackies putting their ideas of racial superiority and purification in place. And, for all of Kate Winslet’s acting skills, she’s not nearly as good at playing the big bad as Donald Sutherland is in the similar role in the Hunger Games movies. The first half hour of Insurgent contains plenty of action, much of it well staged, but, after that, the movie goes downhill quickly. Woodley does her best, but she struggles in a role that requires her to spend most of the movie blaming herself for everything that’s gone wrong in her world. The only character who seems to be having fun is the duplicitous Peter (Miles Teller), whose loyalties go back and forth as the plot demands. The movie culminates in the last of many dream sequences Tris endures, all of which seem like outtakes from The Matrix. However, it’s the audience that really has to endure these sequences to get through Insurgent.
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