Merit Coba

Tris is Divergent.

Not ten percent.
Not forty percent.
She is one hundred percent Divergent according to the Divergent scanner.
We are halfway into Insurgent when this is established for a fact by the bad guys who capture and subsequently scan her. What Divergent exactly is remains a mystery, but it has something to do with the ability to survive a set of trials in a computer generated world whose sole purpose seems to be to kill people when they fail the tests. These trials allow her to unlock the key to a secret power her mother died for. Not that Tris(Shailene Woodley ) volunteers for these tests. Not at all. Tris is forced by the nefarious Jeanine Matthews(Kate Winslet) who makes all Divergent people, mostly young girls on the face of it, go through these trials, thus making her a cold hearted killer.
Whatever Divergent is doesn’t really matter, what is important is that Divergent makes Tris different(and you saw that coming don’t ya?). And 100% Divergent makes her 100% different.

Insurgent is the second installment in a series of three I read afterwards. I just picked it because I wanted to see a movie like this and the picture on the cover looked the most interesting. I happened thus to pick the second one in a trilogy. So I might have missed some important knowledge and unfortunately I cannot find much explanation on the internet. Why, for instance, is almost everyone in this movie twenty something? Even Kate Winslet, playing the head baddie, has her face plastered over so the age gap between her and the rest of the cast and notably Shailene Woodley doesn’t stand out to glaringly.
At first I thought there was a kind of Logan’s run theme underpinning this story but it is not even remarked upon as curious that everyone in the movie is young, with only one or two people looking to be middle-aged. For a while I was fooled in thinking that this movie had a kind of Inception theme:, with the world that Tris thinks is real actually being a virtual full of young people like Second Life is filled with young avatars and as virtual as the computer generated world she undergoes her trials in.

There is actually a case to make for this concept, as almost the whole movie is filled with features that feel trite so to speak(some would say: lame), which made me think that at some moment in the movie it would be revealed that it is all an illusion and Tris is actually hooked up to a machine producing fantasies for her, like happened to humanity in the Matrix.
There is the ‘Amish’ theme, where people are dressed in more simple and rougher clothes. There is the ‘hippy’ theme were the peaceful faction, with long gowns and long hair for them ladies, including flowers in your hair, denounce all violence and ask Tris to leave cause Tris isn’t like them. There are the science guys, cold and arrogant. There are the bad guys, dressed in black leathers and sufficiently cruel. There is a group of factionless on a train headed by a guy with a punk haircut and a leather coat and offensive attitude.
We get dished one run-of-the mill character after the other, all as cardboard thin as the next one. Tris in comparison looks all the more real when surrounded by these staple characters, which make the movie feel like a setup to some grand twist. It never happens.

What is left is a kind of replacement anger for a group of people that apparently thinks so low of their audience as to serve them plot that lacks any originality with characters that are as unoriginal as can be and dialog that is trite. The movie feels like a drag which is compounded by the fact that it is actually longer than your average feature.There is nothing memorable about this movie, hence it is utterly inconsequential. It fades from memory already.