A dystopian franchise with a strong heroine sounds like a smashing success. And it was—for The Hunger Games. The Divergent Series, however, didn’t reach the same height. From the start, the unfinished series battled against a new wave of young adult franchises. Coming off the heels of Harry Potter and The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games delivered with its unique dystopian storyline, while The Divergent Series followed a similar theme. Here lies its problem—the futuristic faction-based lifestyle felt pretty similar to Panem’s district-separated society. And Shailene Woodley’s Tris Prior almost looked like a duplicate of Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen. Both were young women who led rebellions against a controlling government. So, the subsequent films after Divergent fell into the shadow of other YA flicks, such as its sequel Insurgent. But Insurgent is the series’ strongest movie. Why? For starters, Insurgent is the epitome of female empowerment.
The film has a band of sisters rather than brothers like that of The Hunger Games with President Snow, Caesar Flickerman, and Plutarch Heavensbee. This female-led sequel changed the game of the YA franchise tradition since even The Twilight Saga has most male leaders like The Volturi (minus Jane).
In Insurgent, we have Erudite’s ruthless leader, Jeanine, Amity’s leader, Johanna, and the Factionless’ leader and Four’s mother, Evelyn. Jeanine makes her appearance in the first film look weak because she will throttle a divergent’s mind to death in a simulation (“sim”) while maintaining her cold, poised demeanor. You might have thought Jeanine was afraid to get her hands dirty in the first flick, but she defies that allegation in Insurgent when she embraces the role of a torturer. With Johanna, we question whether she embodies Amity or not. She is supposed to represent generosity and compromise, yet she barely hides her dissent toward Tris and the fugitive group. Not only that, but Johanna also protests her faction’s divergent testing, a risky action against a Dauntless leader. Ultimately, Johanna gives a paradoxical meaning to her position as a female leader—she is silent yet fearless. Meanwhile, Evelyn puzzles everyone. Like Jeanine, she seems untrustworthy and a little scary in her nonchalant attitude. Although Allegiant shows Evelyn in a different light, Insurgent introduces us to why she is a questionable character in the first place. All in all, Insurgent unpacks more characters and their respective personalities while also introducing more women in leadership roles. But without this sequel, we wouldn’t know the truth behind each person, especially our heroine.
Tris is tested way more than she was in Divergent. The odds are literally against her as she wrestles with trust and surrender. While Katniss doesn’t have the odds in her favor either, Tris endures a more mind-bending experience than Katniss does. Take that visibly difficult Candor trial, for instance. Thanks to Woodley’s acting chops, Tris is under an immense amount of pain as she fights the urge to surrender to the truth serum. We see her face reveal the internal conflict raging inside her mind. In Divergent, we don’t we don’t get as much of a tangible experience of Tris’ pain. She doesn’t have a full-out battle with herself, even when she experiences a sim for the first time in Divergent. Insurgent details what her internal struggle looks like.
What else is eye-catching about Insurgent are the cinematic effects. With its CGI usage, Insurgent grips viewers with a more detail-oriented image than Divergent and even Allegiant. Divergent gives us a taste of what a sim is and Allegiant takes us over “the wall,” but Insurgent haunts us with the middle ground between a sim and reality—Almost like the Purgatory between Hell and Earth.
Think back to the scene when Tris almost finishes Jeanine’s sim. That slow glass breakage envelopes the audience, as it reaches the camera with shards of glass shooting toward us. But the slowness is key too because it’s easier for the audience to feel like we’re in the sim with Tris. We see every shiny detail in each glass fragment. Yet The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, for example, missed an opportunity to stun the audience with details of its oceanic arena. The spinning Cornucopia scene could have immersed the audience into the water with Katniss when she loses her grasp.
Moreover, several female Oscar-worthy actors spiced it up. Sure, we saw award winners like Donald Sutherland, Stanley Tucci, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Hunger Games. But how many times have we seen Kate Winslet in a sci-fi, action movie? If you enjoyed her recent HBO minieries Mare of Easttown, Insurgent reinforces how the actor can master subtle expressions while also conveying her authority over others. Like her character Mare, Winslet’s Jeanine is consistently composed. However, she breaks that demeanor as her pent-up frustration explodes when she can’t resurrect Tris for the sim, or when she learns the experimental truth behind their society. You may try to compare Winslet’s portrayal to that of Sutherland’s in The Hunger Games because both characters are evil leaders. But the difference is most of us have never seen Winslet is a villainous role.
Next, we have Octavia Spencer, and this wasn’t her first time in a YA franchise; Spencer voiced the snake, Martha, in Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, but she also has starred in various horrors, including Ma. And this is important to note because she is experienced in playing that flickering persona of an untrustworthy character—the kind that Johanna slightly leans into, initially. As Spencer gravitates from innocence to villainy in Ma, you can see how she brought the same skill to Johanna when the character tries to make a quick decision.
And last but not least, Naomi Watts played Evelyn. Watts was no stranger to action movies as she had nailed her sickly, bloody role in The Impossible, and also as the imprisoned sacrifice to King Kong (2005). If you watched either, you noticed how expressive Watts is in these roles as she desperately looks for her son in the tsunami aftermath, or when she is frightened with Kong. Yet, she does the opposite in Insurgent. Instead, she carries an eerily placid face such as in Tris’ dream when Evelyn nonchalantly (and creepily) watches Four sleep, or when she shoots Winslet’s character with no emotion at all (not even anger).