This is an article about Insurgent. We’re letting you know because we won’t actually talk about Insurgent much here, but trust that’s definitely what this story is about. We’re not going to talk about Insurgent much because no one, including most of the people actually in the movie, cares. So, in order to effectively address the release of Insurgent, we’re going to follow their lead and ignore it almost completely.
How did we get to this weird place of wondering whether we should care about a major studio release based on a popular book series that had three sequels greenlit before the projectors cooled down on the first installment, Divergent? In order to correctly address the present, we must first consider the past, and Hollywood’s unselfconscious embrace of the ethos “good enough is good enough.”
There was a time when studio heads would pump the brakes on material that wasn’t working. In those halcyon days, when something like The Golden Compass didn’t live up to expectations, New Line would opt out of producing the rest of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Now, it would have been three books transformed into four movies and an auto-go after the first premiere (even though that movie was totally underappreciated and deserved another chance). The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was an even better movie, but it didn’t hit the marks for Sony so the remainder of the trilogy will likely only live on in its Swedish counterparts.
The number of passes given to movies that are, at best, inoffensive is embarrassingly high.
But the number of passes given to movies that are, at best, inoffensive is embarrassingly high. The Chronicles of Narnia was allowed to meander on for five years and three movies. The trio of Twilight saga movies we had to suffer through after New Moon was unbearable, but hey, at least Edward and Bella—aka Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson—were a cultural phenomenon. Those two proved amazingly bankable, but really? Two Breaking Dawn films?! Fifty Shades of Grey is currently in negotiations with its principals for the sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, but even with the pre-release boost of so much salacious fodder, everyone has basically stopped talking about it already. Surprise! Turns out sex in movies totally existed before Shades, and now that our curiosity has been assuaged we don’t really care. And now, we’re at the halfway point in the Divergent series, with enough tepid reviews for the second movie to keep us lurching towards the third and eventual fourth. Gross.
And this is what’s ruining studio movies. It’s not actually the adaptations or the reboots of dormant properties or the wholesale remakes of old ones that is sucking our souls. It’s the vomiting of resources onto unnecessary big-budget sequels that could have been used to fund better, smaller ideas—or the occasional ultra-expensive awesome one (…like, um, bringing Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune to life for real). And no, I’m not including Michael Bay in that argument, so settle down. Whether or not you like them, Bay movies are still spectacular—in one sense of the word or another. Transformers: Age of Extinction may have made your ears bleed and your brain turn to jelly, but at least you didn’t pay $15 for a nap, which is what might happen if you buy a ticket for Insurgent. (In his Vanity Fair review, Richard Lawson called the movie “a whole lot better than the first,” while calling Divergent a “perfunctory chore” in the very first paragraph.)
So let’s talk about Divergent for a second. The YA adaptation starred many talented people, including industry/media darling Shailene Woodley and Oscar winner Kate Winslet, yet the best that can be said for Divergent is: “it happened.” Has any hotly anticipated, big-budget studio picture ever landed with such a benign thud? Its critical reception wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad, either. Even terrible ratings likely would have been better for the franchise overall (in other words, they may have given it a swift death).
When a film is neither awesome, nor awesomely bad, it lands in movie purgatory—doomed to be hated by few and loved by even fewer. (No one gets a Razzie for “It was OK, I guess” and at least the Razzie is an award.) Thankfully, a precious few people had the good sense to say “no thanks” when it came to The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and Vampire Academy. No good was to come of trying to make fetch happen with those franchises. But no, as long as a movie can scrape by, as Divergent did, earning just enough in all the right performance metrics to check the requisite boxes, it is allowed to live on in sequels that get progressively more arduous as the years go on—for fans and stars alike.
The lack of industry interest in Insurgent is staggering for a movie of its size. But since this machine has been set to autopilot, it requires the absolute minimum amount of exertion from all parties involved. Consider this: Naomi Watts appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! two weeks ago to “promote” the film, and during her 13-minute interview talked about Insurgent for a whole 50 seconds before Kimmel brought up another movie she did last year. Miles Teller went on The Tonight Show earlier this week and touched on the film for 20 seconds before transitioning into Woodley’s love of eggs and almonds. (Woodley, bless her, went on Late Night with Seth Meyers and managed to talk for two minutes about doing stunts for the franchise.) Teller, mind you, is on record explaining to W magazine that he was “feeling dead inside” while filming Divergent, adding, “I didn’t have an interesting part, and I’d taken the film for business reasons: It was the first movie I’d done that was going to have an international audience. I called my agent and said, ‘This sucks.'” (He recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he was likely “more burnt out than bored,” but, come on dude; you can’t unsay “dead inside.”)
But really, Teller is just an example of how you can’t sink these sequel factories even if you try. Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan just wrapped the most uninspired press tour in history, that included one of the most uncomfortable interviews I’ve ever seen. The campaign of pain even prompted Jezebel to write a series of posts about how much the co-stars appeared to not exactly be BFFs (see: “Double Crap: Fifty Shades of Grey Stars Can’t Fucking Stand Each Other” and “Fifty Shades Leads Continue to Hate Each Other on the Cover Of Glamour “). In the New York Post review for Insurgent, Lou Lumenick said, “Practically everyone you’re watching seems to be wishing they were somewhere else.” If you didn’t know the context, you’d have to flip a coin to decide which movie he was talking about.
The teams behind Fifty Shades and Divergent (and Narnia and Twilight and whatever other mediocre pile comes next) have all committed the same mortal sin: playing it far too safe for anyone to really give a damn about what happens next, leaving their subsequent sequels with only the fumes of momentum to feed on. If you’re going to make the same movies over and over again, at least swing for the fences! Flame out spectacularly on an origin story and the worst that can happen is your sequels don’t get made, and who needs more bad movies on their production calendar anyway? If you’re going to make bad movies, Hollywood, at least give audiences the respect they deserve by trying. Watching you phone it in is getting really old, and I’d really rather spend my time watching Shailene Woodley be weird in a movie with Eva Green than fulfill her interminable obligations to you.
Stephen Witty of the Newark Star-Ledger put a fine point on the problem when he said in his Insurgent review, “While the ending is meant to build up anticipation for the inevitable parts three and four, it plays as mostly resolved; you don’t walk out of the theater thinking, I can’t wait till the next one.” Studios keep cashing in on the promise of “the next one,” when they should be working harder to earn our money with the first. I hope you’ll find it “good enough” if I watch your movie for free on the Internet in a few weeks, guys. That feels like the appropriate amount of compensation in return for your ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ level of effort.
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