It’s well documented that I am not a big fan of the flood of dystopian young adult novel series being made into movie trilogies/quadrilogies these days. It’s a shot-out genre with little or no innovation and it just won’t stop. The latest offender is “The Divergent Series: Insurgent,” the follow up to last year’s “Divergent.”
Take a quick second to think about every movie trope you’ve ever encountered. Got it? The “what appears to be real life is actually a dream,” the “let’s fight without our guns,” the “idiotic and overly-dramatic use of futuristic technology” and the list goes on and on. The punchline is: there all in here. While watching “Insurgent” I honestly wondered to myself if the movie was trying to set some type of trope record.
Granted, I am not the target audience – far from it. That said, the film, in and of itself, is bloated by everything from its intentionally one-dimensional characters, to its incredibly simplistic plot which is poorly disguised as depth, to the consistently terrible writing where every character has a whole pack of “deus ex machina” (a contrived plot device where an unexpected power or event saves a seemingly un-savable situation) get out of jail free cards in their pockets.
Perhaps most egregious is “Insurgent’s” fondness for administering mind-altering chemicals to its characters and never once using any type of disinfectant. Time and time again people are stuck with needles or shot with drug-injecting ball things and I was severely distracted by my genuine concern that everyone in this entire civilization was going to suffer from widespread infection and disease. Also, just a quick physics note, shooting a gumball-sized metal projectile at assault rifle velocity would probably take off heads, not gently put people to sleep.
The above paragraph is “Insurgent’s” greatest failure. The entire movie I was more concerned about the poor medicinal practices and the physics of the weapons than I was about the safety or success of the main characters. That’s no bueno.
3 of 6 stars