Insurgent (2015)
Directed by Robert Schwentke
Beatrice Prior must confront her inner demons and continue her fight against a powerful alliance which threatens to tear her society apart.
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19 films that influenced Insurgent
What critics say influenced Insurgent
I would compare it to Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films, but with classier actors and better special effects.
Despite its overtures toward thought-provoking sci-fi, The Divergent Series, as Insurgent is prefaced in the advertisements, is actually more akin to Screen Gems franchises like Resident Evil or Underworld, only not as stylish.
Although some may feel it unfair to compare Woodley's character to Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss in The Hunger Games series, it's fitting because the two have much in common.
As it turns out, Insurgent , much in the same way that Catching Fire improved vastly on The Hunger Games , is a far superior sequel.
Look at the directors of the girl-centric Twilight saga, The Hunger Games, and now the Divergent series and compare their bodies of work to the ones who have worked over at the boys’ club at Marvel, and you’ll see it’s the latter who are more accomplished.
“The Divergent Series” is no match for “The Hunger Games,” but “Insurgent” has its moments.
And for this reason, Jeanine wants to find her; for Jeanine, we now find, found a Box buried by the Founders 200 years ago and protected by Tris's now-dead parents, but the Founders made it so that only a Divergent could open the Box and thus receive their Message about what to do in this moment of Crisis, because having determined that just copying The Hunger Games was too limiting, the series at this point goes for the classics and starts stealing plot points from Isaac Asimov's Foundation.
The author, Veronica Roth, isn’t a tenth as talented as The Hunger Games’ Suzanne Collins, but she has a more powerful agenda.
Performers of the caliber of Octavia Spencer (doing better dystopia in last year’s Snowpiercer ), Naomi Watts (this is step-up dystopia from Tank Girl ) and Daniel Dae Kim (about as logical as whatever kind of ‘topia Lost was) show up and do their thing, and then exit stage right.
The head-tripping visuals help, too, reminding us of the world-building construction and deconstruction Christopher Nolan’s exceptional “Inception” dreamed up.
Should we be terrified when Tris is captured and forced to endure computer-simulated hardships from the “Martix”/“Inception” playbook?
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And, if we’re being honest, she does it just about as well as it has been done since Weaver stepped into that mech-loader and battled the bitchy Queen at the end of Aliens.
The art direction imagines those Quixotic flights of fantasy in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil by way of the gritty, technological sheen of a James Cameron.
See, Jeanine has found some kind of box, she calls it, that’s akin to the magical stones in The Fifth Element .
Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer (“The Help”) and Oscar-nominee Naomi Watts (“21 Grams”) each make their series debut in bite-size roles – Spencer as the leader of the peaceful faction Amity, Watts as Four’s estranged mother.
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Even “The Two Towers,” in Peter Jackson ’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, suffered from middle-book-itis, a condition in which a story neither begins nor ends and thus leaves audiences unsatisfied.
It's like a flash-mob remake of "The Breakfast Club."