There’s almost nothing here that boys can’t identify with in the exploits of Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley: The Fault in Our Stars, The Spectacular Now) in her dystopian future sci-fi world. Offering us a gal protagonist is the least of this series’ novelty, although that’s rare enough from Hollywood, which, a few outliers like this and Hunger Games aside, still fails to appreciate that plenty of girls and women dream of derring-do, just like boys and men do, and would like to see a female hero onscreen. Divergent appeared to utilize those tropes with just a tweak here and there to distinguish them - if only just barely - from its obvious inspirations. And the really clever thing about Insurgent that elevates it a step above the first film, Divergent, is that it sneakily undercuts a lot of the tropes of what has become a subgenre: the young-adult hero’s journey. The essential thing about Insurgent is that it gets all the important stuff right (as do, for the most part, all those other series). Substitute comic-book foundations, and the same applies to the Marvel movies. Take away the book-adaptation issues, and the same applies to the Star Wars films. So what? The same applies to the Harry Potter movies and the Hunger Games flicks. Is the world it posits perhaps implausible? Could be. Is it convoluted, perhaps unnecessarily so, perhaps has a result of adhering too closely to the novel it’s based on? Maybe.
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December 2022
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