Livre d'Or

Reason for watching it: I went to the cinema with friends including a teenager, and it was his choice. It would probably have been quite low down in my own priorities, given it's the middle of a trilogy where I've neither seen the first nor read the books, and YA dystopias aren't terribly my thing anyway. But I was very glad to join my friends on their cinema trip.

Circumstances of watching it: I'm working from home today, which meant for once I was in Cambridge Sunday evening, and was able to join the party going to the Light cinema in the complex behind the station, along with jack, ghoti and her oldest.

Verdict: Insurgent is watchable even if it's not the kind of thing I'm usually into. I also agree with jack's review quite a lot.

I've seen a fair number of rants about Roth's Divergent trilogy, and yes, it is a stupid dystopia where oh noes, bad things happen to pretty white people and the world-building makes no sense whatsoever. And it's too too obvious to have the evil régime persecuting people for having more than one talent / trait, so that the despised outsider is without even trying sympathetic to the audience given she's an outcast precisely because she actually has a personality, not to mention being super awesomely multi-talented.

At the same time, there's something heartening about the fact that it is a big blockbuster movie made out of a book that's explicitly aimed at teenaged girls, where the Chosen One is female and so on. ghoti was saying that the unexpected success of Twilight meant that Hollywood suddenly woke up and started considering adaptatations of books written for and read by teenaged girls as a viable market. So it's a big dumb action movie that's mostly pure marketing, but it's no worse than any number of films that are fanservice for young men with disposable income.

I was able to enjoy it by not merely suspending disbelief but by approaching it with no disbelief whatsover, simply ignoring any questions of plausibility, from the fact that there's shiny high tech futuristic electronics and lots and lots of shooter game style guns but no evidence of any industrial base, to the way that everybody's far too clean and well made up for the circumstances they're supposed to be in. There's some nice post-apocalyptic decaying city landscape and generally rather nice visuals and cinematography.

We ended up going to the 3D showing, which is something I've never experienced before. I ended up feeling quite doomsick, though tbh I still don't feel one hundred percent today so I'm not completely convinced it was the 3D screening's fault. Whether or not it make me sick, it wasn't an example that convinced me that 3D films are worth it; yes, you did see stuff apparently projected in front of the screen, but everything was slightly blurry and I think my brain is better at interpreting flat, but rather higher definition pictures. Also lots of shots looking down from the tops of high buildings, and I'm not especially afraid of heights but I don't find that a particularly pleasurable experience.

I did like Tris as a protagonist, she really gets all the hero tropes, the impulsiveness, the character growth, the angst about people who have been killed because she wasn't yet awesome enough to save them, the boyfriend who's very much her reward or at best side-kick. She does get rescued a bit more often than perhaps a male hero would, but still. I particularly liked the bit where she makes the morally right choice to turn herself in when the enemy threatens to keep killing the outlaws who are harbouring her until she's captured, and the narrative is clearly sympathetic to this, even though her boyfriend, Four, makes an impassioned speech about he loves her and therefore her life is more important than everybody else's. I did have a bit of a hard time telling the secondary male characters apart, particularly the brother Tris is trying to protect and the "friend" who is mostly obnoxious and often treacherous.

Still, dumb movie or no I did agree with the teenager in our party that the film shares the typical flaw of YA dystopias that it shoehorns in a rather unnecessary romance arc when the saving the world from the evil government should be much more interesting. I was rather appalled to learn that her fear of intimacy in the books has been transmuted into a fear of rape *eyeroll*, not to mention the gratuitous tentacle rape imagery in the scene where she's captured by the evil government.

I was also pleased by the structure, cos despite being the middle of a trilogy, Insurgent actually has a proper climax. Apparently the three parts are more or less three standalone novels in the same setting, so it didn't feel middle-ish at all.