Tris (Shailene Woodley), Four (Theo James), Caleb, Peter, and Marcus are hiding in the Amity faction commune outside the walled city of Chicago.   They are trying to decide their next move after they stopped the mind control of Dauntless soldiers to kill Abnegation through a simulation created by the Erudite faction.  Meanwhile, the Dauntless traitors (aligned with the Erudite) have found a hidden artifact that the parents of Tris tried to hide from Jeanine (Kate Winslet), the leader of the Erudite.  Jeanine believes it contains an important message and she begins the quest to round up the right Divergent (the ones who don’t fit in just one faction) to pass the five faction simulations to unlock the message.   Once a Erudite search for Divergent at the Amity compound forces Tris, Four, and Caleb to flee, they must head back into Chicago where they encounter the leader of the factionless (Naomi Watts) who also happens to be Four’s mother.  

 

INSURGENT manages to compress most of the novel’s story successfully except the third act where it compresses the story too much even though some of the changes are better than what happened in the book.  The Amity farm commune reminds me too much of an open space hippy commune where the so-called lead Johanna isn’t how I imagined the character in the book.  Her part is sidelined along with the part Marcus played in the book.  Some of these changes go unnoticed for the first two thirds of the movie, but it may be what hurt the third act as they try too hard to streamline the movie into a two hour adaptation of Venrocia Roth’s sequel to her Divergent novel.   A bigger effects budget really expands the world of future dystopian Chicago, but I do think INSURGENT would have been a better movie if they allowed it to be a little longer and give the third act a proper follow through.   Theo James and Kate Winslet are the top actors here where Shailene Woodley just isn’t as effect as Tris as she was in the movie.  It could be due to the direction or the way they changed the novel for the movie.  

 

INSURGENT is an imperfect adaptation and a sequel that falters in the final third.  It doesn’t get it right like how THE HUNGER GAMES movies have managed to take the right parts of the book and trim away what isn’t needed for the movie.   I hope the division of the final book in the DIVERGENT series into two movies will correct any problems they had with adaptation the first two books where some things are better than the book while other parts worked better in the books.

 

This review is ©3-22-2014 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to feedback@enterline-media.com

 

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