The latest trailer for “Insurgent,” the upcoming sequel to last year’s “Divergent,” doesn’t show much to get the viewer excited for the movie. Practically every line of dialogue uttered sounds like something you’ve heard a million times already, including lines as unmemorable as “We have to stop her … together,” “This is the only chance to rescue what little civilization we have left” and “Dark times call for extreme measures.” Even the title of the trailer is generic: “Stand Together.” Themes of teamwork or sacrifice could theoretically make the movie more than another by-the-numbers dystopian trope-fest, but nothing in the trailer suggests anything thoughtful or new.
D+
“Divergent”
Summit Entertainment
The trailer does promise action for the movie, though even that is uninventive and tedious. In a convenient montage that doesn’t pause long enough for you to realize how uninteresting each individual shot is, Tris (Shailene Woodley, “The Fault in Our Stars”) leaps through a glass wall, a CGI building explodes, Four’s (Theo James, “Bedlam”) face disintegrates into little silver bubbles, a blue laser beam ripples down a street and Tris jumps off a building, soaring through the air to catch the end of a cable. None of this looks real, and in many of them, it’s clear that even in the context of the movie, they’re supposed to be simulations. An action movie built on attractive action simulations could be fun and cool-looking — after all, any action movie is technically unreal — but there’s no exciting choreography, little genuine emotion and worst of all, no apparent stakes. Unless you count Ansel Elgort saying, “You are living proof that the Divergent problem has grown beyond all control” as a signifier of legitimate conflict.