Yesterday the first Insurgent trailer was released. While exciting, it left me already feeling a little worried about this film.
My worry doesn’t necessarily stem from the story being told in the Insurgent trailer, which is something about Tris seeing her (dead) mother in a type of fear landscape. The scene has been hotly debated over the past day as fans try to figure out the context.
No, my worry comes from something I remembered from my interview with Divergent director Neil Burger.
“Keep it real.”
I interviewed Burger during the Divergent junket in the spring, after we learned that he wouldn’t be returning for Insurgent because he couldn’t take on the project with the amount of prep time the studio gave him.
I asked Burger what his one tip was for Robert Schwentke, the person the studio tapped to helm Insurgent.
“The one tip would be to keep it real, because the movie’s not about the future or futurism, it’s about human nature,” Burger said. “And then everything she’s experiencing is stuff we can relate to. So you have to believe it, and make it relevant to now.”
Earlier in our interview he told me that Summit selected him for the project because of his “keep it real” vision for the story. “In the same way we were going to treat the performances and experiences that Tris was undergoing real and emotionally present and true, I wanted to treat the world as real,” he said. “And to that end to shoot in Chicago. I wanted to avoid as much computer generated imagery as possible. I wanted to use the skyline.”
By avoiding CGI, Burger could differentiate the Divergent franchise from other dystopian/science fiction films. “You see these movies and they’re set in the future. There’s good ones and there’s bad ones, and they all seem to have the same kind of computer generated cityscape. It’s cool and an achievement in visual effects, but I always know it’s not real. It always seems painted or fake. So I thought, ‘How could I make this movie different? Let’s use Chicago as Chicago, this monumental landscape skyline.'”
Watching the Insurgent trailer, one realizes there is nothing “real” about it. The thing looks like it was shot almost entirely on a green screen, and that’s probably because the sequel was shot in Atlanta instead of Chicago, where the story is based, for financial purposes.
That means we’re probably going to be seeing a lot of green screen. That goes against Burger’s vision, which was part of the reason the first Divergent film worked so well. Seriously, watch Divergent again to appreciate how real it looks. Shailene Woodley was on top of real buildings! And climbing the real ferris wheel!
There is good news to keep in mind concerning this film’s potential. According to reports, Insurgent shot in many locations around Atlanta, and there was at least one two-day shoot in Chicago. It’s also important to keep in mind that Atlanta is – in broad terms – visually similar to Chicago.
And in fairness to the trailer, we were watching a sequence happening inside Tris’ head, so in a way it makes sense for it to look kind of fake.
Then again, we should remember what Dumbledore told us about things that happen inside our heads: “Why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
Watch the Insurgent trailer below:
