For the uninitiated, here is a potted history of the DIVERGENT universe. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic city, in which the citizens are divided into 5 factions according to their personality types: Candor, Dauntless, Amity, Abnegation and Erudite (pronounced ‘Eryudite’, in a way that is peculiarly maddening). There is, it then transpires, a further category called ‘Divergent’, which refers to somebody who doesn’t slot neatly into any of the factions. Divergents are considered dangerous for reasons not too closely examined, and they become the targets of a manhunt by the movie’s lead baddie: ice queen and power-dresser Janine (Kate Winslet). Our heroine Tris Prior is, of course, one such person.
So, there are five groups of people to follow, which isn’t too difficult in the first instalment because each faction wears different types of clothing. But by the time the action of INSURGENT takes place, the faction system has broken down, and everyone is busily disguising themselves as people from other factions. This is incredibly confusing. The problem is greatly exacerbated by the proliferation of scenes that take place in sinister simulations and people’s dreams. INSURGENT suffers from that classic problem of the difficult second film in a trilogy, in that you do need to have seen the first one pretty recently in order to follow what’s going on. As a result, there is a glut of expositional dialogue about the faction qualities, which gets old fast.
In many ways, this is typical dystopian teenage whiffle; a special girl realizes she is truly special because she has emotions and can kick people. Hey, Katniss Everdeen. Like her Hunger Games counterpart, Tris Prior spends a lot of time running around in forests, having emotional showers and saying things like “I never wanted any of this”. In fact, a good deal of the dialogue could appear in any young adult action movie of the last decade: “You can’t protect everyone”, “I’m not as strong as people think”, “We need to find that very special one”, yada yada yada.
The majority of the film is taken up with Tris and her cohort simply moving between different places, usually by jumping on and off moving trains which this franchise has an inexplicable fetish for – along with people getting stuck in the neck with needles. It would not be an exaggeration to say that someone gets injected with something in or near their neck every 10 minutes in INSURGENT. This is matched in frequency only by the occurrence of fistfights, which are admittedly quite bad-ass on the whole.
(SPOILER ALERT)
By the close of play, we discover that the city in which they live (isolated from the outside world by a scary wall which for some reason nobody seems at all curious about) was an experiment designed to save the rest of the world from some unspecified end-of-days horror that has taken place. The Divergents are the key to earth’s salvation. Somehow. The logic of the film is even washier than you expect from this sort of movie. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you have to trust me”, says Tris to her troubled-but-sexy boyfriend Tobias. They really missed a trick in not using this as the film’s tagline. What was the ‘experiment’? To create Divergents, or by their real world name, well-rounded people, by making conditions as difficult as possible for them to exist? How is it supposed to work? How do the simulations work? Why do people in the simulations look like they’re sitting in an inflatable pool chair that hasn’t been blown up properly?
INSURGENT is noticeably a middle movie of three, but it isn’t as bad as it could have been. The performances are universally solid, including a turn from WHIPLASH star Miles Teller, and there is enough advancement of the DIVERGENT plot here to keep one interested.
@ImogenWK
Imogen West-Knights 