Insurgent's special effects can't save its lifeless plot

Insurgent, like last year’s Divergent, relies on special effects to buttress a sagging storyline.

In case you missed the first installment in the series, or haven’t read the popular young adult books the series is based on: The world’s remaining inhabitants live confined within the high walls of a post-apocalyptic Chicago. At age 16, each person chooses one of five factions—Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, or Erudite—for permanent membership. Sprinkled among these groups is a small number of Divergents, each of whom possesses the talents characteristic to all five factions.

Erudite chief Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet) manipulates the warrior-like Dauntless faction to wrest power from Abnegation (the selfless ruling class) and to root out Divergents, whom she deems dangerous to societal order. Beatrice “Tris” Prior (Shailene Woodley) survives Dauntless initiation without revealing she is a Divergent. At the end of the first movie, Jeanine is poised to wipe out Abnegation.

Insurgent (rated PG-13 for intense violence and action throughout, some sensuality, thematic elements, and brief language) opens with Tris in hiding. Jeanine rules the city now, and she is again on the hunt for Divergents. She has discovered a box containing a message recorded by the city’s founders two centuries earlier. Only a Divergent who withstands five perilous computer-generated simulations can open the box.

Throughout Insurgent, Tris battles feelings of guilt and anger leftover from the end of Divergent, when she killed a mind-controlled friend in self-defense and her Abnegation parents died protecting her from Jeanine. “When people get close to me, they get hurt and they die,” she says at one point. “I can’t forgive myself.” She wants revenge against Jeanine but maybe also herself. Woodley’s Winona Ryder-like frail intensity is the movie’s one consistent high point.

The two films may appeal to young people who, like Tris, feel they do not fit in—if you can accept a beautiful heroine with ninja-like fighting prowess is an outcast. Perhaps Insurgent’s dystopian youthful society is a rebuke of social media’s claustrophobic conformism.

Interpretation aside, there isn’t much more to Insurgent than what meets the bird’s eye view. The film’s plot pingpongs between roof top skirmishes and mettle-testing computer simulations. The only suspense is suspension: Tris and her friends spend a great deal of time hanging off the sides of buildings and whizzing down zip lines strung between skyscrapers. But a solitary twist at the very end of the film ensures fans will come back to see how it all turns out.