As I did in my review of the first instalment, in this movie series I should probably point out that I have not read the books. Some people claim that this movie do not follow the books but, obviously, I cannot comment on that. So my review is based on the movie and the movie alone. I have to confess that I mostly watched this movie because I did watch the first instalment and felt obliged to see where the story went.
This movie have quite a few fairly cool special effects, especially the ones when Tris is in the virtual reality world trying to open the cube with the message to the inhabitants in the closed up city. Unfortunately this pretty much sums up the good parts of the movie.
As with Divergent I found this movie to be fairly mediocre. One reviewer said that this was a movie dumbed down for the teenage audience. Unfortunately I feel that he was right. Also unfortunately I think many teenagers are a lot smarter than Hollywood believe they are.
The plot is, well, mediocre. The acting is fairly meh. The main character, Tris, really lacks any form of charisma and spends most of the movie going around in some state of melancholy feeling sorry for herself and everything that happens around her. Apart from Four most of the people were behaving immaturely, cluelessly, froze up or panicked whenever something nasty happened and switched allegiances back and forth like you changed shirts.
When Tris finally opened the cube I was expecting something cool and unexpected. What we got was a rather dull message about the city and its “purpose”. I complained in my review of divergent that we got absolutely no background information as to how the people had ended up in this ridiculous situation with a closed city and these factions that I still do not understand what they were supposed to solve. The message was supposed to explain this but it explained absolutely nothing except that the divergents were some kind of purpose or solution.
The ending? Well again this is a book series so it is not surprising that it ends in somewhat of a cliffhanger but it was really a cheap ending, one that you would expect from a TV series episode.
So I cannot say that I liked the movie very much. The virtual reality special effects scenes were fairly cool but that was about it.