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| Directed by Robert Schwentke Written by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback |
Here we go again. Willed into existence in the wake of The Hunger Games becoming a worldwide phenomenon, Divergent was one of the most frustrating films of 2014. It starred Shailine Woodley as an outspoken teenage heroine in a vaguely dystopian future society, who discovers that she is the one special snowflake that can save them all from an allegorical caste system that holds them in bondage. (If you've heard that enough times to be bored, I could not agree more.)
The thing that set Divergent apart, sort of, was that while other YA fare such as The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Harry Potter to some extent - or even the genre's great-granddaddy The Catcher In The Rye - appealed to socially awkward teenagers through having protagonists that felt trapped in a long-standing societal order that didn't quite understand them, Divergent took it a step further by arranging its dystopian hellscape according to the pecking order of a high-school cafeteria. To wit, after a vague but incredibly destructive war, society has holed up in what's supposed to be Chicago, and divides itself into 'Factions' roughly aligned with virtues and occupations deemed essential to a functioning society. You've got the Jock Tribe (Dauntless/soldiers), the Nerd Tribe (Erudite/engineers, I think), the Hippie Tribe (Amity/farmers), the Teacher's Pet Tribe (Candor/administrators), the Dropout Tribe (Faction/home-less), and the Home Ec. Tribe (Abnegation/lawmakers).
That last one is the birth-faction of our heroine Tris, but she's never quite fit in with them. Once she goes up to the not-Sorting Hat on her sixteenth birthday, she discovers for a fact that (gasp!) she doesn't fit neatly into any of the Factions, and is instead a Divergent, and possesses all five virtues at once. (Wouldn't 'Convergent' make more sense as a name for all five traits existing in one person?) Because the state considers a varied skill set to be a threat to the social order, she chooses the Jock Tribe, they get used as henchmen in a conspiracy by the Nerd Tribe to take power, she thwarts that plan and escapes on a train headed far, far away from Future Dystopia No. 437.
The thing that made Divergent more than just a bad movie, and in retrospect probably what got it so high on my Worst of the Year list, isn't just that it's insulting how blatantly it panders to my particular age range. (Seriously, I'd like to think that teenagers are smart enough to demand better than this) Nor is it just that it's badly acted and looks worse, but that it's actual conception of social cliques among youth is dying fast in the Information Age.
In the Information Age, nerds have become jocks that happen to root for a fandom instead of a football team, and they can be just as toxic, exclusionary and intolerant if not more so. (Look up GamerGate if you want proof of that) In the Information Age, things that used to be staples of geek-dom; comic book superheroes, video games, high fantasy epics, etc., are now so close to being mainstream in the form of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, smartphone games and Game of Thrones respectively, that the distinction is practically archaic. In the Information Age, even the once ironclad division of musical tastes has gone away. Thanks to the MP3 and the Internet, everyone listens to everything and it's become normal.
The once clear boundaries separating social-cliques of the late 20th' Century are fast becoming obsolete in the 21st' Century, and it would be amazing if one of the authors of the dominant literary trend of that century recognized this by trying to create a different sort of dystopia. Especially since "Social structures are an arbitrary construct of human authorities that don't really exist" is more often than not the point of their multi-volume adolescent angst-fests...
...Two Hours Later...
... Insurgent picks up a few months later with Tris and company living among the Hippie Tribe to hide from the system, which has been fully taken over by the Nerd Tribe in between movies. (Didn't they stop the coup in the first one?) The Nerd Tribe's leader has found a MacGuffin Box from before the war that supposedly contains a way to solve the Divergent problem for good, but it requires one in order to open it, so the city has been placed under martial law as an excuse to hunt down any and all Divergents. When the system catches up with them, they realize that the only way to escape it is to tear it down, and form an alliance with the Dropout Tribe to take down the kinda-sorta Objectivist Nerd Tribe.
(Sidenote- There was a minor thematic line of "Smartness Leads To Arrogant Dickery" in the first one, but it's more apparent here. Our heroes are as dumb as a sack of hammers, and the villains are explicitly stated to be society's brightest minds. - End Sidenote)
While Divergent was a fusion of Hunger Games and Twilight, i.e. it's a dystopian future but with a romance story as it's primary focus, Insurgent is much more of a straight-forward action film, and it shows. They clearly got clearance for a bigger budget, and they're ridiculously eager to show it off with big detailed sets, and big elaborate FX sequences, and big sweeping shots, and a marketing campaign focusing on IMAX presentation meant to show off all that awesome big-ness. Unfortunately, the sets are empty and blandly designed, the effects would have been state-of-the-art in 2002 maybe, on television, and the camerawork- has actually improved from the first one since IMAX cameras are incompatible with shaky-cam.
The acting, which may have salvaged some of this, is almost uniformly terrible. Theo James is seemingly incapable of emoting, Ansel Elgort has left his Manic-Pixie-Dream-Boy charm on the set of The Fault In Our Stars, Miles Teller comes closest to a good performance, bringing some of his flippancy from Whiplash to the show, Kate Winslet gets nothing to do as the villain other than look menacingly upon efforts to open the MacGuffin Box, but the worst performance by far comes from Shailine Woodley. I like her as an actress, she's been good elsewhere, but she's at her best when she's can crack some jokes, which Insurgent's heavy-handed melodramatic screenplay sadly never lets her do.
The screenplay is atrocious. The characters make no sense, they either get one personality trait or no personality traits, our lead is practically a Mary-Sue, the plot is shoddy logic stacked on coincidence stacked on deus ex machina, and the world-building is shoddy at best and nonsensical at worst. For example, the factions are supposedly based around personality traits, but anyone can choose to enter any faction. How is the varied skillset of a Divergent supposed to be out of the ordinary if there's frequent unregulated inter-faction mixing going on? (Is it just a crime to have more than one personality trait?) Why is a society built to achieve maximum efficiency leaving all these ruins filled with useful building material lying around? Why is that society using 17th' Century farming equipment for food production to sustain a population at modern levels? If you poke around at the seams even the tiniest bit, the whole illusion just falls apart.
From terrible writing to wooden acting, horrid production design taken from a Build-Your-Own-Fascist-State Kit, and terrible direction marinating all of it, the Divergent Series' second verse is the same as the first. The song goes on and on, my friends, and it never, never ends....
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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