Insurgent kicks off with Tris (Shailene Woodley) on the run. The attack on Abnegation has been blamed on a faction of Divergents and their allies. Jeanine (Kate Winslet) has acquired what she wanted from the attack of Abnegation, but she needs a Divergent to make use of it. Both sides prepare to go to war as the entire system breaks down. But when Jeanine's forces gain the upper hand, Tris is forced to go through a series of challenges that will test the limits of her Divergent nature in pursuit of the truth about their society.
At a vital point in Insurgent, Tris turns to her boyfriend/ally Four and says that what she's about to do doesn't make any sense. He just has to trust her. Tris may as well have been talking directly to the audience. As Insurgent gets deeper into the mythology behind the arcane system of factions that has supposedly maintained peace for two centuries, the holes really start to show. And when the answers are finally made clear, none of it is remotely satisfying.
The story just doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. So apparently, Tris' parents were hiding a box that contains a message from the founders. Why they were hiding it is unclear. Why it was with them in the first place is vague. Why Jeanine thinks the box will vindicate her views is also unclear. And when the box is eventually opened and answers are laid bare, it all just falls apart. It turns out that the foundation of their entire society is something irredeemably stupid.
The story goes through all sorts of hoops to deliver a message that is pretty muddled in the end. You shouldn't choose to be just one thing? The best thing is to be all things? People are equal? Don't feel guilty about getting people killed? It's something like that. Whatever it is, it doesn't feel like it's worth the trouble. In the end the film is just another iteration of a special girl saving the world by being different from everyone else. It's really exhausting at this point.
To be fair to the film, it does manage to make all this nonsense look fairly appealing. The visuals can get muddled, but the movie occasionally puts together these gripping images that offer its scenes some measure of distinction. And Shailene Woodley is still a very capable presence on screen. She has one pretty bad scene in this movie, but for the most part she's a pleasure to watch. No one else has a defined enough character with which to work, but a cast of seasoned professionals makes a lot of it work.
Insurgent fails mainly because it doubles down on an already absurd premise. It is hard enough to accept the setup of this world, which already seems overly contrived. To go back to its origins and actually explaining the underpinnings if such a silly concept could only have led to this pile of nonsense. And so Tris has to tell us that what she's doing isn't going to make any sense. She pleads that we just trust her. The thing is, the movie doesn't do anything to properly earn one's trust.
My Rating:
