Insurgent – movie review

Grade: C

I’m not a fan of the Divergent series and haven’t read the books. I watched the first movie the night before Insurgent was released and found it to be uninspiring. I wasn’t disappointed with Insurgent because I didn’t expect much.

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The best thing I can say is that it isn’t horrible. They managed to put the pieces together well enough that the movie isn’t ridiculously bad. But I was never able to get caught up in the story — I’m clearly not the target demographic. All I could think was, “This looks like Inception, this part is just like the Matrix,” and so on. There’s nothing wrong with being derivative of other films. Most great stories are derivative of one thing or another. Insurgent is just a little too obvious with it. It copies not just concepts from other stories but also the visual representation. For instance when Tris is connected to the simulator is exactly like Neo connected to the mainframe at the end of Matrix Revolutions.

Because the story is so derivative it’s also predictable.

The story doesn’t put a lot of demands on the actors, so I didn’t find anyone who stood out, but at the same time there weren’t any poor performances. This all adds up to an exceedingly average movie.