Fantasy

When did young-adult movies become so childish? Look, it makes perfect sense that adaptations of YA fiction have experienced a boom at the multiplex. Teenagers go to the movies in droves, and so studios are constantly scrounging for the next mega-franchise, hoping to transform fantastical allegories into real profits. And when done right—as in the Harry Potter movies (the subgenre’s preeminent jewel) and, to a lesser extent, the Hunger Games films— these properties can be artistically valuable as well as commercially successful. The problem with Insurgent, the second installment in the Divergent series (based on a trio of novels by Veronica Roth), isn’t that it’s set in another futuristic dystopia or that it’s populated primarily by blandly attractive adolescents. The problem is that it’s dumb.

Part of my issue with Insurgent may be that I’ve never read any of Roth’s novels. Perhaps if I were familiar with the source material, I’d be more responsive to the gibberish about “Abnegation” and “factionless” and “sims”. But I tend to doubt it, and besides, it’s the job of the screenwriter (or screenwriters, in this case, as the script is credited to Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback) to translate a novel’s prose into the language of cinema. Here, the more the characters blather about the five factions (and the so-called Divergents who transcend their boundaries), the more infantile the whole thing seems. Worse, where Divergent at least indulged in some opportunities for dopey entertainment—like a nighttime game of “Capture the Flag”, or a pedagogical knife-throwing session—Insurgent is aggressively dour, with a false sense of solemnity that stifles the storytelling. If you can’t make your hapless tale of boilerplate heroism smart, at least make it fun. Read More