Insurgent

Insurgent picks up where its predecessor, Divergent, ended (you can read my review of Divergent in an earlier post at this blog).

Quick recap: in Divergent, humanity lives within a massive, walled off city, separated from the rest of the world.

Those who live within the walled city must identify as a member of a particular faction, which thus determines each person’s career, clothing, and life.

Tris, our protagonist, discovers that she exists as a divergent (individual). She doesn’t fit into any particular faction.

The city's evil-for-no-reason leader, Jeanine, outlawed individuality because . . . ? Tris must therefore keep her individuality a secret.

So, yeah, pandering. A story that tells the kids that they fail to fit flawlessly into any particular group because they exist as unique, beautiful snowflakes.

Tris and her boyfriend (who finally found a shirt since the first movie), spend Insurgent’s opening on the run from the police, because they’re individuals, and The Man don’t approve.

Tris wrestles with guilt. She feels responsible for everyone harmed by the authorities that pursue her.

Her boyfriend wrestles with his anger towards the mother who abandoned him.

Insurgent therefore seems a movie about forgiveness, to others and to oneself.

Evil Leader Jeanine eventually discovers some strange box, though what she expects to find inside it, why she wants it, and how she even knows it exists remains unclear.

Jeanine also inexplicably knows that only a “100% divergent” can open the box for whatever reason. Only our protagonist, Tris, exists as such a person.

Tris—because Hollywood hates an active, female protagonist—spends an alarming amount of time crying and acting helpless.

Until Act Three, she can’t seem to find the strength to make a single decision. Every action she takes, she takes because someone told her to do so.

Jeanine captures Tris and forces her to open the box. Tris must (Spoiler Warning), in order to open the box, confront and forgive herself.

I feel perfectly willing to play along with such a convenient gambit for the sake of character arc, but this all plays so on-the-nose. Subtly never dips a toe into this pool.

The writers seem so concerned that their audience won’t “get” their movie’s moral premise that they spoon-feed it to them.

The characters trip over the story’s wide plot holes (for example, these characters vanish and rematerialize without explanation, as if entire scenes rest missing from the final reel).

These same characters often perform deeds that make little sense. Loyalties switch at the drop of a hat and rarely for any believable reason.

Spoiler Warning! The hidden treasure within the box? A hologram with two pieces of information to share (keep in mind that someone stuffed this message inside the box over 200 years ago).

1) Individualism is good (seriously).

2) People still exist outside the wall that surrounds the city (funny how no one, in over two centuries, thought to . . . you know . . . look).

The storyline, in short:

1) Tris feels bad, so she cries a lot.

2) Antagonist wants Tris to open some mystery box for reasons that remain cloudy (funny how our antagonist seems the only person with a goal).

3) Tris needs to feel better in order to open the box, so she feels better, because feelings work that way when your writers possess about ninety minutes to sort out everything.

4) The box opens and the audience feels as if it reopened Al Capone’s safe.

Insurgent beats its audience over the head with a shallow moral premise. It marks time with a lot of inconsequential action and tries to distract everyone from how little sense it makes via special effects.

I would skip this one, folks.

Chappie

Chappie provides a rare treat, a biblical movie that fails to sound preachy. Perhaps this happens because the movie performs more as a metaphor of religion (think Tron Legacy) than as a shallow, religious-based, scare-tactic (think The Lazarus Effect).

In Chappie, Dev Patel plays God. Well, actually, he plays an inventor named Deon Wilson, who builds a robotic police force.

These robots act intelligently, but lack free will and creativity. Deon desperately wishes to create life capable of these gifts. He eventually succeeds to create such a robot, which writers Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell surprisingly named “Chappie” instead of “Adam.”

Still, the writers must’ve feared, on some level, that their audience might not grasp the metaphor, so Deon often tells Chappie, “I am your Creator. You must listen to Me.”

Chappie discovers himself influenced by people who act as walking metaphors for greed, envy, and every other sin ever imagined.

One character, played by Hugh Jackman, behaves as the embodiment of War.

Chappie quickly discovers himself “adopted” by two criminal humans who tell Chappie to call them “Mommy” and “Daddy.” Daddy afterwards behaves as the bad father, pushes upon Chappie gender roles and fear of the outside world.

This robot wishes to read, watch cartoons, and paint while the world's underbelly taints him . . . until he grows enraged and violent and loses all contact with his Creator.

Chappie eventually decides for himself the lines between right and wrong, but not without humanizing irony.

He viciously assaults a characters for killing someone, beats the attacker within an inch of death, all the while Chappie screams, “Violence is wrong,” as if to stage a statement against . . . say, the death penalty.

Chappie also discovers how to create life on his own, and thus he becomes a metaphor of humanity's desire to create artificial intelligence, which brings the entire movie full circle.

Chappie's Creator also creates him with a defected battery, which means that Chappie can only live for a limited time. The realization that he will die, further distances Chappie from his Creator.

SPOILER ALERT! THIS PARAGRAPH! Deon the Creator dies, but Chappie manages to reincarnate him into the body of another robot—which wears paint red enough to remind its audience of a certain, infamous, false god (though I might read too much into that detail).

Chappie possesses no shortage of flaws as a movie. Nearly every other scene ends in a way that makes little to no sense, usually in the following formula:

Person A must stop Person B through any means. Person A possesses every ability to stop Person B . . . and yet fails to do so for no apparent reason.

However, Chappie still works as a film, so long as its audience can suspend its disbelief and enjoy Chappie as an artfully constructed metaphor, rather than a solid story with an acceptable number of plot holes.

The best part of this movie remains the fact that I continue to revisit it in my head, to pull at and twist it, rethink certain scenes. That seems a damn good experience for twelve dollars and two hours.

Also, a bright pink Uzi feels pretty entertaining.

The Lazarus Effect

If your date likes to squeeze your hand whenever something on the big screen jumps and screams, “Boo,” then The Lazarus Effect might hold some value for you. Otherwise . . .

A small group of scientists in Lazarus create a serum that can bring people back from the dead. While the writers might travel plenty of interesting paths with this idea, they failed to step in any real direction beyond, “Science scares me and makes God angry.”

The scientists, much like the characters in Pet Sematary (I know, I condemn these comparisons and then make them, myself), start with an animal. They, in this case, resurrect a dead dog. The dog afterwards acts strange and aggressive.

This further opens the field for interesting debate, but the characters simply carry on with their shallow, “Will this make God angry?” conversation.

One of the scientists dies, and, wouldn’t you know it, they resurrect her. They afterwards treat the hole that runs through her head, skull, and brain with a Band-Aid (no, really), and then she gains telekinetic powers for no discernable reason.

She then starts to kill everyone . . . because.

The comically ridiculous response of the other scientists to split up and look for their angry zombie faces magnification due to the fact that their lab (where nearly the entire film takes place) offers only a few rooms.

I felt as if I watched Jason from Friday the 13^th hunt teenagers in a small shoe store.

Lazarus makes noteworthy use of lighting, and some of the scares (while not inventive) manage to actually startle the crap out of you. The actresses and actors work hard. The visuals work. This movie’s good points end there, unfortunately.

The story proves so onion-thin that, short as it runs (and it runs short), it still seems artificially stretched for an eternity.

The movie’s message (don’t research science; you’ll make the invisible wizard in the sky angry) annoys me on a personal level.

The writers even seem concerned that their audience won’t receive the message. To combat this concern, they present us with a scene where the scientists must (because of magnetism issues) remove their metal crucifixes before they perform their wicked experiments.

Yet the story never gives its audience a reason to like the invisible wizard in the sky, who fails to lift a finger to save its characters.

Worse, we discover that God sentences one character to an eternity in Hell because of a mistake she made as a five-year-old.

It seems that the writers felt no conviction towards their own communication.

Lazarus stands an uninventive, jump-and-scream-boo, horror movie that preys on the fears of people who performed poorly in science class.

I would pass on this one, folks.

Thanks for reading.

Daughters of Darkwana received a sweet, succinct review, which you can read here, http://www.thebookeaters.co.uk/daughters-of-darkwana-by-martin-wolt-jr/

         Also, the third book in my series, Diaries of Darkwana, will hit Kindle just as soon as I find a new cover artist. I have a few candidates already, thank goodness.

Movie reviews at moviesmartinwolt.blogspot.com

Short stories at martinwolt.blogspot.com

A look at the politics of the entertainment world at EntertainmentMicroscope.blogspot.com.

An inside look at my novels (such as Daughters of Darkwana, which you can now find on Kindle) at Darkwana.blogspot.com

Tips to improve your fiction at FictionFormula.blogspot.com