The Red Band Project

There’s nothing all that wrong with Insurgent. It’s actually a somewhat competent sequel in the Divergent series that doesn’t suffer middle chapter syndrome: there’s some action and the storyline moves. It’s just that… What were we talking about again?

Oh. And there you go.

Somehow, Insurgent is just not memorable. We’ve seen all of this before in Twilight, The Hunger Games, Mortal Instruments, Beautiful Creatures, The Maze Runner, The Running Man, and of course, Battle Royale. And by now, unless the young adult book adaptation movies do something drastic with their female heroines and post-apocalypse imaginings (or lack thereof), the genre is just about as burnt-out as the landscape in Mad Max.

In fact, I can barely bring myself to re-cap the last film, much less do a synopsis for this one. Frankly, I completely forgot Divergent and actually had to rent the film to watch again the night before the screening of its sequel. And once the lights went down and the screen lit up, I still did not have total recall. And no, I wasn’t drunk.

Here’s my best try: In the future, to keep the peace, a walled city kinda like the one in Attack on Titan or Mega City One in Dredd is broken into five factions of society. Or was it seven? I’m too lazy to look it up so we’ll just go with five, yes, five factions. Our heroine Tris, used to belong to the self-less, government-ruling Abnegation but when she hit puberty, she decided to join Dauntless, a group in charge of policing the city and they like to hoot and holler, get tattoos and run around a lot.

Oh, and Tris took a test that revealed she is a Divergent—she can fit into more than one faction. So by the first movie’s end, Tris’s parents died, and she, her brother Caleb, her new boyfriend Four, Four’s abusive father, and a kidnapped member of Dauntless played by Miles Teller are on the run. The new film opens with them taking shelter in Amity, a faction devoted to peace and love. Actually, I’m not sure what the difference is between Amity and Abnegation except Amity seems more hare krishna-like because they offer good tidings when they give you your plate at the buffet line.

You know, this is actually really (too) complicated. I forgot to mention Kate Winslet, leader of the smart people, Erudite, who wants to rule the city like Donald Sutherland in The Hunger Games. She needs Tris to unlock this box that looks like the Tesseract from The Avengers. Once unlocked, the box will reveal some sort of big thing. This all takes place in this room with tentacles that stab into Tris like the ones from The Matrix and Tris enters this simulation like the one in The Matrix and she does all these tasks and things explode slowly in a nice computer-y way like The Matrix and…

What were we talking about again?

I just don’t wanna type anymore. I’m tired. The actors, Buddha bless them, don’t seem to mind relentless cinematic thievery though. Teller plays the ruthless, kidnapped Dauntless baddie Peter with the proper sense of bullying and self-loathing. Ansel Elgort plays Tris’s conflicted brother Caleb. And Shailene Woodley plays Tris with a determined ambition to not be pegged as a Jennifer Lawrence wanna-be. (Interestingly enough, Woodley slept with Teller in The Spectacular Now. She also slept with Elgort in The Fault in Our Stars. At this rate, by the end of the decade, at least on screen, Woodley could possibly sleep with the rest of the series’ male cast.)

Oh and everybody in the theater squealed when Daniel Dae Kim popped up as the leader of Erudite. He conducted himself with great dignity. (Does anybody still watch Hawaii Five-0? Oh wait yeah…my mom.)

I think we’ve come to the point where we must simply acknowledge that these films were made from books that were made for young adults. Particularly young adults who haven’t seen many other movies. I think I’ll stop here. I’m tired of writing about it and to paraphrase the wise words imparted by Taylor Swift, I should just shake it off.

One more thing. They’re also planning to split the final book in the series, Allegiant, into two movies. Like Harry Potter. And The Hunger Games.

I’m trying to just breathe and relax. And shake it off.

Insurgent is now playing in theaters everywhere.