Insurgent (2014)

"Hey look a rainbow. I love this place. Pathological friendliness..."go with happiness". -Peter

Here's a link to my first review of divergent.

http://donttakewhatisayseriously.blogspot.com/2014/06/divergent-2014.html

I liked it.

So I went into Insurgent with very mild expectations of quality. My mistake.  I should learn, but I don't.

Insurgent was not the pleasant surprise that its forebear was. It was as if the creators decided that in order to make the film different and better they had to take out all of the content that made Divergent pretty good and put in explosions and hallucinated dreamscapes.  Insurgent is most definitely not a bad movie....but is decidedly formulaic and lacks any of Divergent's sparkle. Oh and the giant flying box of turmoil like a super mario level and absurd.  

There are two other points that I want to bring up as relates to Insurgent: McGuffins and source material.

McGuffins:  A McGuffin is any desirable object serves as motivation for characters in a story. Examples include such things as The Case in Pulp Fiction or The One Ring. The McGuffin for Insurgent is honestly just a box.  It glows. It has immense power. It does nothing. I kinda laughed at the ridiculousness of this particular motivating object. Apparently, Kate Winslet just desperately wants to open the box. "Open the box, Kate!" Conveniently, the only way to open the box is our main character Tris...shocker.

Source material:
Upon viewing Divergent I commented that the idea seemed rehashed like Avatar and Battle Royal. On that thought I went ahead and read the book to see how accurate I was.  What I found is that while the books are simplistic, the story, set up and themes of the book are in fact vivid. This led me to be slightly ashamed for the movie.  How could one waste such vivid themes like forgiveness, compassion, empathy, sacrifice, and predestination? Now having seen part 2, there is no doubt that the writing team wasted the noble efforts of the Author Veronica Roth to instill a greater debate among literate teens and possibly uplift her chosen genre from the depths of twilight induced schlock.  For shame producers and writers.  If you have a simple source with clear themes and emotionally connective writing, don't waste it.

On a scale of first person to fourth person narratives, I give Insurgent, 2.49 out of 5 stars.