Insurgent

Hollywood loves nothing more than a good bandwagon. The American movie industry’s motto seems to be: “That made money? Well, let’s do more of that!” Certainly, this thinking is responsible for the rampant case of sequel-itis Hollywood has, but also it’s to blame for copycat syndrome. Studios hear about projects in the works at other companies and often rush their own version into production trying to beat one another to the release date. During the 90s, there times when there were no fewer than three Robin Hood movies, two Wild Bill Hicock films, and two meteors-coming-to-smash-the-earth movies in some stage of development at the same time. Hollywood may be the dream factory, but few of those dreams are original material.

This brings me to our current trend of the moment – dystopian science fiction films based on Young Adult novels. The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, The Maze Runner, The Giver – they are all more or less the same film over and over again. In the future, society has broken down and has been remade. In an effort correct problems from the past, the new society is strict, repressive, and based entirely on conformity. One lone person bucks against all that homogeneity and becomes a reluctant hero who liberates the rest of the benighted population.

 I saw Insurgent last weekend and was again struck by the powerful sameness of these movies. Each one of them is essentially two hours of adolescent anxiety made up to look like science fiction. When you’re a teenager, you’re really interested in where everyone belongs. Remember how well you knew the geography of your high school lunchroom? How you just knew that all the baseball players sat in one place and the drama kids sat in another? Remember how you mentally assigned people to their clique based on what they wore, what kind of music they listened to, and who they sat with in class?

This simultaneous need for and fear of categorization is at the heart of these films, especially the Divergent series. The whole premise is that following a vaguely outlined collapse of the world we know, Chicago became a city-state all unto itself and is divided up into different boroughs. Each person is tested for their dominant personality trait and is then assigned to live and work in a faction with people just like them. Bravery, love, intelligence, self-sacrifice, and honesty are the five factions to which people can belong – except for people who somehow don’t fit inside the box, people who diverge from what society expects of them, people like Tris Prior, played by Shalaine Woodley.

Tris is a typical “chosen one” figure – like Harry Potter or Neo or Frodo – she is inherently special but is reluctant, unsure of herself, and insistent that she’s just like everyone else. The first film in the series focused on her discovering her divergence which means she has traits from all the factions - while the second film, Insurgent, is all about reconciling herself to the cost of being different. 

Between this role and her work in the teen-weepie The Fault in Our Stars, Woodley is the teen actress of the moment. I haven’t seen her in much else, so I’m not sure if she has more range than she demonstrates in Insurgent. But in this movie she has basically only one setting which is various degrees of the self-loathing pout. She’s good at it, but seemingly it’s her only trick.

Besides the obsession with categorization, another thing the dystopia movies share is an old, white, Aryan authority figure. Think Donald Sutherland as President Snow in the Hunger Games, Meryl Streep as The Chief Elder in The Giver, or Patricia Clarkson in The Maze Runner. All older, all white or blonde hair, all insistent that these rebellious teenagers essentially get off of their futuristic lawn and turn down that goshdarn loud music of rebellion. In Insurgent, this role is taken by Kate Winslet in a bleach blonde, unbending turn as Jeanine, the head of the intelligence faction. Winslet is a great actress and makes a fun villain, but it’s not a terribly nuanced role, so she doesn’t have much to do except look superior and occasionally superior and slightly threatened.

Insurgent isn’t a great film. It’s not even one of the best dystopian films. It is an interesting example of how Hollywood works to draw in teen and tween dollars by taking their concerns about fitting in and dealing with adult authority figures and turning them into the widescreen epic that they feel like when you’re a teenager.