Category Archives: Review

Review: THE MARTIAN by Andy Weir

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A few weeks ago, the trailer for the upcoming sci-fi film The Martian released online. Look, here it is. Watch it. I’ll wait.

Looks pretty great, right? I saw it was based on a book. “Should I read the book?” I wondered aloud on social media.

Then social media nearly peed itself with enthusiasm. “YES,” everyone said, “READ THE MARTIAN.”

Okay, I thought. It had been a while since I’d read any adult sci-fi that really engaged me as a reader, and I was way overdue for something good. So I ordered the book, and waited eagerly for its arrival.

And dude.

Dude.

The Plot (from Goodreads):

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him & forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded & completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—& even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills—& a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

My Thoughts:

THE MARTIAN is, hands-down, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t mean “best” in a technical sense — although I don’t think it has many faults in that arena either — but in a couldn’t-put-it-down, laughed-out-loud, recommended-it-to-everyone-I-knew, still-thinking-about-it-weeks-later sense. I loved it so much it’s hard to write a review without devolving into incoherent squealing noises, but I shall try.

The appeal of THE MARTIAN hinges almost entirely on its main character, Mark Watney. The vast majority of the book is his first-person journal entries, where he describes his efforts to survive alone on a hostile planet, for years, using accommodations and supplies meant to last a month. This is a dangerous device, because if the reader doesn’t like the main character, there’s literally nothing else to focus on. Mark is it, at least for the first significant chunk of the book. Take him or leave him.

Fortunately, Mark Watney is the kind of character I could read forever. Though most of his narration is spent breaking down the science of survival (soil cultivation! structural engineering! making water out of rocket fuel!), which sounds like it should be the most tedious of subjects, I was riveted from the first page to the last. He had a way of describing even the most complex processes in ways that were not only easy to follow, but exciting and, against all odds, funny. Never in my life would I have thought I could be so invested in potato farming, or laugh so hard at the woes of a man caught in such dire circumstances.

There are no bad guys in THE MARTIAN, and it doesn’t need any. There is only Mark (and, eventually, NASA) versus Mars. Since Mars is always present, and always deadly, the tension stays ratcheted up throughout. Life on Mars may be monotonous for Mark, but for the reader, there are no dull points. Everything Mark does is a matter of life and death, all told through a lens of determination, scrappiness, and wry (occasionally profane) humor.

Science is practically a main character in THE MARTIAN, but author Andy Weir — through Mark — breaks it down into language that was completely accessible to me, a total layman. Even though practically every page contains Mark working through calculations, conducting chemistry experiments, or engineering unorthodox solutions to his problems, the narrative never felt bogged down by it, nor was I ever confused. Everything from the technology to Mark’s methods to NASA’s reactions were all presented in such a compelling and believable way that I occasionally had to remind myself that this was science fiction, not a true story.

THE MARTIAN is everything I want in science fiction. High stakes, excellent pacing, unexpected humor, an amazing premise, smart yet accessible science, and fully realized characters that I miss once the last page is turned. It easily launched itself to the top of my list of favorite books, and is a story I look forward to re-reading many, many times. 100 out of 5 stars.

Jurassic World: Trying yet again to recapture the magic of Jurassic Park

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I’m beginning to think that Jurassic Park was lightning in a bottle.

This weekend, Jurassic World will stomp into theaters like a rampaging T-Rex, the third in a series of heretofore disastrous sequels attempting to recapture the magic of Spielberg’s original dino-masterpiece. But while it comes closer than either of its predecessors to giving me what I wanted in a Jurassic follow-up, it still fell far short of the jaw-dropping wonder of the first film. And after two cringe-worthy sequels and one lukewarm one, I’m starting to wonder if Hollywood should just stop trying.

Lots of Jurassic World winds up feeling like a dull shadow of Jurassic Park, like someone studied the original film, making notes of random plot and character points, and then tweaked them for this movie without considering what purpose they served in the original.

Oil-and-water child siblings shuttled off to spend time with a detached non-parent relative (dressed, inexplicably, all in white) on a remote island filled with dinosaurs? Check.

A rugged, outdoorsy type cautioning the park-runners that they don’t have enough respect for what they’ve created? Check.

A starry-eyed park owner with deep pockets, little sense, and fluffy, sugar-coated idealism? Check.

A dude intent on stealing the dino-technology for his own nefarious and greedy purposes? Check.

A giant, carnivorous dinosaur attacking kids trapped in a vehicle? Check.

A character running from a T-Rex while holding a flare, an oh-crap moment of we’ve-underestimated-the-dinosaurs’-intelligence, a quiet moment with a long-necked herbivore, scientists failing to consider the implications of splicing dinosaur DNA with not-dinosaur DNA, trapped kids being menaced by raptors, an 11th hour out-of-nowhere dino hero moment — check check check check.

And yet, while the Jurassic World filmmakers did not make a bad movie by recycling so much of the original, they really missed the mark on what made it special. Jurassic Park was groundbreaking in its effects, sure, but it was also smart in its storytelling. There were far more forces at work than just Dinos Gone Wild, though that seems to be all the sequels remember.

It had the hubris of man, embodied in John Hammond and Dennis Nedry, trying to force the narrative along according to their will.

It had the pitting of science versus nature, as a paleontologist, a paleobotanist, and a mathematician (chaotician, chaotician) are forced to come face to face with things that, until now, they’ve only been able to study in the abstract.

And underneath it all, chaos. This was the entire point of the Ian Malcolm character — to give voice to the chaos undercutting everything they tried to do. Malcolm was there to point out that no matter how much control humans may think they have, there will always be something they haven’t accounted for, because they can’t. It’s easy to overlook in all the black-leather-Jeff-Goldblum-stuttering-and-swaggering amazingness, but over and over, Malcolm warns the group that the very idea of the park is, in its essence, flawed.

“The kind of control you’re attempting simply is…it’s not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it’s that life will not be contained.”

“The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here staggers me.”

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Interestingly, it’s Ellie Sattler, not Ian Malcolm, who sums up the main conflict of the first film toward the end, in a conversation with John Hammond. “When we have control,” Hammond begins emphatically, envisioning how next time, he’ll be able to open the park without problems — then Ellie interrupts, “You never had control, that’s the illusion!”

And it was this thread — this smart, scientific approach to chaos, to humans being forced to admit they could do nothing but watch as things spiraled out of control, and how each time the humans desperately grasped at a way to pull things back together, something else went wrong, to the point where they ultimately had no choice but to admit defeat and flee the island — that made the first movie so thrilling to watch.

In a film that is universally praised for its groundbreaking effects, it’s easy to assume that the spectacle is what made it great — and three times now, sequels have tried to capitalize on bigger spectacle — but without that slow crumbling of control; without the gradual realization of the humans that, no, there is no mastering what’s gone wrong here, there is only, at best, surviving it; without that underlying, razor-edged tension of  watching characters struggle for better circumstances while knowing, deep down, that things will only get worse, you’re left only with special effects and screams. Which may be visually cool, but it isn’t interesting.

This is Jurassic World‘s main misstep. All throughout, despite the glossy effects and big-budget action, it feels too controlled. Both the park itself, and the structure of the film surrounding it. Even though you have Chris Pratt’s character, Owen, darkly warning Bryce Dallas Howard that they shouldn’t be cooking up their own dinosaurs, it turns out to be a bad idea not because the dinosaur is a dinosaur, and thus unpredictable, but because the dinosaur is smart. And while yes, the raptors in the first film proved to be smarter than the humans thought, it wasn’t their intelligence that made the first film terrifying; it was the idea that the humans have no idea what they’ll do next.

All throughout Jurassic World, the dinosaurs are predictable and controllable. Yes, their Frankensteinian creation winds up getting loose and chomping up people and other dinosaurs left and right, but they can see where it’s going, they can shuttle park attendees around to keep them (mostly) out of harm’s way, and throughout the film they never doubt that if they can just subdue that one dinosaur, everything will be fine again.

As for the other dinosaurs — the ones whose survival instincts trumped every effort of man to control them in the first movie, and became exaggerated monstrous versions of themselves in the second and third — they remained either docile in their cages, or were let out only to do exactly what humans wanted them to do. Sometimes they get a bit out of line (the scamps), but even then, they were really only a threat to people who didn’t take the effort to truly understand them.

If Ian Malcolm had died in the first movie the way he did in the book, Jurassic World would have him rolling over in his grave.

Chris Pratt’s Raptor Gang, while a cool action sequence, totally undercut the entire point of the first movie, which was that no matter how much humans might think they’ve mastered nature, they haven’t. Instead of being unwieldy instruments of chaos, the Jurassic World dinosaurs are tools: pets and weapons and rides and blunt objects. The humans are caricatures of the characters in the first film, and as such, it was hard to invest in any of them outside the main quartet, who — though they spent much of the movie’s 2-hour run time cowering and running and screaming — never felt like they were in any real peril.

Jurassic World is not without its good points. Unlike the last two sequels, there are no cringe-worthy, eye-rolling moments of pure inanity. There are snippets of humor, mostly courtesy of Chris Pratt, who can’t help but have great comedic timing even with a mostly wooden script. There are some amazing effects, and as far as shot-for-shot beauty goes, this is probably the most visually stunning of the bunch. There are some sweet moments between the two kid brothers, and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire goes from being stiff and distant to genuinely root-worthy. And though the movie’s spectacular, dino-violence-filled climax is not necessarily shocking, it is still pretty darn fun to watch.

But while the original Jurassic Park felt like intelligent, taut, truly frightening science fiction, Jurassic World is simply a summer popcorn flick, with dinosaurs. It won’t make you think, it won’t scare you, it probably won’t even get your pulse up, aside from a few jump scares. It won’t give you any great one-liners to quote over and over for the next two decades, or any characters who will stick with you like friends. But it will entertain, and make you smile, and give you ample amounts of gorgeous CGI and thrilling action sequences.

And maybe, if the original is lightning in a bottle, that’s the most we can ask of a sequel.

Here’s my Drive Through Movie Review of Jurassic World that we filmed right after seeing the movie, in which I couldn’t quite pull all my thoughts into coherent words yet, but I did try to imagine what a Goldblum-T-Rex hybrid might look like.

Book to Film: The Five Best (And Worst) Changes in Jurassic Park

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Remember a million years ago when I was going to talk about movie adaptations of books and the changes made to the source material and whether or not it worked and it was going to be great — and then I never did it again? I’m sure you were real broken up about that.

But this week, before Jurassic World hits theaters, I wanted to talk about the movie (and book) that started it all, Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park is one of my favorite books of all time. Of. All. Time. It was my gateway into the world of science fiction. I’ve read it so many times my old mass-market paperback is falling apart.

I love the movie too. But it’s totally different. Totally. Different. It’s one of those rare instances where completely altering the plot and characters from the original actually worked to the adaptation’s favor. And today, because I am seeing an advance screening of Jurassic World tonight and can think of little else, I want to talk about some of those differences, for better or for worse.

Top Five Best Changes for the Movie:

5. Gennaro dies on a toilet

No-one’s-favorite-character Donald Gennaro, the “blood-sucking lawyer” who panics and hides from a T-Rex in a rickety bathroom stall, actually makes it all the way through the book. Yes, Ian Malcolm dies and Gennaro lives, because in the book, life is unfair and chaos theory reigns supreme. In the book, Gennaro isn’t even present during the T-Rex attack, and another character (Ed Regis, who is not in the movie) runs off and dies instead. But for the purposes of film, having a T-Rex eat Gennaro by plucking him off a toilet established what the characters were up against in one massive chomp, and we didn’t even have to lose a character we liked to accomplish it.

4. John Hammond is Santa, so of course he lives.

In the book, Hammond is not the kind, gentle, every-grandpa of the movie, but a greedy, manipulative old miser who learns absolutely nothing during the meltdown of the park, blames other people for everything that goes wrong, and in the end gets slowly nibbled to death by compys on a beach. Good riddance, book readers think when he dies.

In the movie, John Hammond is misguided, sure, but we still love him.

“Mr. Hammond,” Grant says at the end, “After careful consideration, I’ve decided not to endorse your park.”

“So have I,” Hammond replies, jaw set as he drives the escape vehicle to the helicopter.

Book!Hammond would never do this. He’d never admit he was wrong. It works in the book — which is about chaos and the hubris of man and the vast power of nature and the resiliency and resourcefulness of humans in desperate circumstances — but in the movie, which is about rampaging dinosaurs, there’s really no need for a human villain.

3. Lex is not entirely insufferable 

In the book, Tim is both the older sibling and the computer nerd. Lex is his younger tomboy sister, and basically does nothing helpful the entire book. In the movie, they made her the older, tech-savvy sibling. She’s the one who gets the Park’s electrical systems back on line toward the end, she distracts a velociraptor from eating her little brother in the kitchen scene, and though Lex is probably not anyone’s favorite character, without her involvement, a few more beloved characters probably would have gotten eaten.

2. T-Rex gets the hero save

The movie is not at all concerned about all the pesky science in the book; it just wants to give us cool dino action. And it delivers. The T-Rex in the book is only ever a gigantic, menacing animal, but the T-Rex in the movie swoops in like Batman at the end to save our main quartet from raptors, and then roars triumphantly as the Jurassic Park banner flutters dramatically to the ground, and oh dear readers, it is glorious.

1. Ian Malcolm lives

“I don’t always get bitten by a T-Rex, but when I do, I sit like this.”

Ian Malcolm’s injuries from the T-Rex bite are far worse in the book than in the movie, and just before the end, he succumbs to them and dies. This is then retconned in the opening pages of The Lost World, in one of the least-believable passages I have ever read in a Crichton novel — and Crichton books are about dinosaurs and aliens and time travel and homicidal gorillas — probably because Jeff Goldblum was popular and Hollywood wanted a sequel starring him. Which was…terrible. But, horrible sequels aside, for the sake of the movie, keeping Malcolm alive was a smart choice. It would’ve been a lot harder for the movie to have the optimistic ending it did if Jeff Goldblum had not been grinning on that helicopter.

Top Five Worst Changes for the Movie:

5. Grant and Ellie never sneak into a velociraptor den with a bunch of nerve-gas grenades

A big subplot from the book which the movie pretty much ignores is Alan Grant’s obsession with understanding how the raptors are reproducing and how far they’ve spread so that they can be sure they eradicate them all. Gennaro wants to blow the whole island up with a bomb, but Grant insists that first they must infiltrate a raptor nest and count eggs so they know how many raptors they’re dealing with. So Grant, Ellie, and Gennaro squeeze their way into an underground raptor den armed with a bunch of nerve-gas grenades, intending to do the count, then kill all the raptors. Before they can, all the raptors run away and they don’t wind up gassing them, but watching our main characters crawl into a nest and hide right under the noses of a den of raptors would have been pretty great.

4. Henry Wu is only a cameo appearance, not a main character

Having one of the park’s chief scientists along for the ride adds a ton of insight into the dinosaurs (in the movie, Grant picks up some of that slack, but a lot of Wu’s contributions are just omitted entirely), and really plays up the science aspect of this science-fiction story. However, keeping him out of harm’s way in the first movie — in the book, Wu is eaten by a raptor toward the end — has left the door open for him to be alive and kicking and still cloning dinosaurs twenty-two years later in Jurassic World.

Huh. Maybe it’s not good that Wu survived, since he apparently learned nothing.

3. Grant never bowls poisoned dinosaur eggs down a deserted hallway

At one point toward the end of the book, the kids and Gennaro get cornered by raptors, and Grant lures them away to the hatchery, where the dinosaur eggs are kept. He then injects the eggs with a lethal poison and rolls them down the hall to the raptors, where they eat them and then drop dead. It sounds dumb when I explain it like this, but in the book it’s extremely tense. Much like the kitchen scene in the movie (which I love and would like to keep — I just also want the egg-bowling scene).

2. Grant and the kids never take a hazardous boat ride down the river

I think we’re learning by now that I really liked a lot of Grant scenes in the book that never made it into the movie. In the book, Grant, Tim, and Lex take a raft down the river (because Jurassic Park has a river) that takes them through the aviary, to the lodge. They are attacked by pterodactyls. They dodge the T-Rex again. They go over a waterfall. Alas, none of this is in the movie. And when we finally do get boats and pterodactyls in Jurassic movies, it’s awful.

Oh well. At least we’ll always have The River Wild.

1. Robert Muldoon dies

Robert Muldoon is the only character who actually deserved to make it through this story. He is knowledgeable about dinosaurs, he respects them, he warns everyone time and time again about how dangerous they are, he understands how they hunt — and in the book, all this knowledge and respect and cunning is rewarded by him making it off the island. And while allowing for his death in the movie gives us one of its best lines, I will always wish that he had then promptly escaped by crawling through a pipe, as he does in the book.

Also, my personal theory is that Jurassic World is the result of Hollywood realizing this, and deciding that not only should Muldoon have lived, but he should have been the main character, and then building a movie around it. No one can convince me that Chris Pratt is not just playing Robert Muldoon 2.0.

I could keep going — there are a million and five changes between the book and the movie — but I think you get my point. Normally part of me cringes when a movie deviates significantly from its source material, but I’m still able to love Jurassic Park for what it is. It’s awe-inspiring and suspenseful, full of adventure and heroism and moments of humor and wonderfulness.

Still, part of me is glad that Jurassic World is not based on a book, so that I won’t have anything in my head to compare it to (then I remember that Jurassic Park 3 was not based on a book and it was terrible, but shhhhhh I’m trying to block that out).

How about you? If you’ve read the book and seen the movie, what were some changes that you liked? Or parts from the book that you wish they’d kept? Or you can just talk about how excited we all are to see Jurassic World and the Chris Pratt Raptor Motorcycle Gang, because let’s be real —

— This is awesome.

Review: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

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Recently I was approached with the opportunity to interview Celeste Ng, debut author of Everything I Never Told You, for YABC (look for that interview to post next month). I’d actually decided to take a hiatus from reading YA for a little while — I’ve been nitpicking every YA book I’ve read recently, which I think has far more to do with me hitting a saturation point than the books themselves — and was preparing to decline for that reason, but then I read the summary. And I couldn’t say no.

Not because it was a family drama surrounding a dead kid, but because it was a family drama about a Chinese-American father, a white mother, and their mixed-race kids. Which is my family. And while I’ve never been a person that needs to see myself in a story to relate to it, I was curious to see if my experience would be reflected in this book. There simply aren’t that many books out there with Chinese characters, especially books with Chinese characters that are not about being Chinese. So I was intrigued. How would she pull it off? Would she pull it off?

Let’s discuss.

(Also, before we get to my review, I want to mention that after reading this, I don’t believe this book is YA. I assumed it would be, since I was reading it for YABC, but while there are indeed some teen characters, I feel this book is more accurately described as adult literary fiction with crossover appeal.)

The Plot (from Goodreads):

Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . . So begins this debut novel about a mixed-race family living in 1970s Ohio and the tragedy that will either be their undoing or their salvation. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.

When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart.

My Thoughts:

From its very first page, EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU utterly captivated me with its poetic, sparse prose and keen emotional insight. Each word feels carefully chosen to immerse the reader in the Lee family’s household, which seems ordinary at first — in spite of the dead girl no one has yet discovered — but as the layers peel back, we learn things are far more complicated.

I was surprised, at first, at the narration of the story. Told in the third-person, EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU strolls casually through the thoughts of its five main characters — parents James and Marilyn, and their children, Nath, Lydia, and Hannah — sometimes sticking with one character for nearly an entire chapter, other times jumping from one to another to another all within the confines of a single scene. In addition to that, the narrative also darts back and forth through time, from James’ and Marilyn’s childhoods, college years, and courtship, up through their children’s lives, all the way to and beyond Lydia’s untimely death.  One might think this head-hopping and time-leaping would be disorienting or confusing, but it isn’t. Ng juggles it all masterfully, so that instead of the story rolling out in a neat line, it unfolds like a flower, all at once and in every direction.

The characters themselves were an interesting puzzle. On the one hand, they almost felt less like people and more like concepts or symbols. Though I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a book about racism, or feminism, or parental pressure, or adultery, or sibling rivalry –all those themes are present, and important, but as an undercurrent to the story, not the story itself — there are times when it seemed as though a character was the embodiment of an issue, rather than the embodiment of a person. Normally, this would turn me off. I love a good plot, but I read for character. If the characters don’t feel like real people to me, that doesn’t usually bode well for the book.

However — and this is a huge however — in this particular case, I was all right that the characters felt a little more ambiguous, because the emotion was spot-on. While I’m not sure that James is a person one could ever know, the way he felt growing up as the only Chinese kid in an all-white school rang entirely true. I could feel my hands shake as Marilyn stepped into a physics classroom full of men, feel my stomach clench as Lydia’s grades slipped and tumbled, feel my heart sink as Nath learned how mean children can be. I had to stop reading at one point because I needed to remind myself that the family’s grief was not my own; at another, I put the book down so I could go into my sleeping daughters’ room and hug them and tell them that they were loved, because the pain the parents in the book felt at not being able to tell Lydia those things left me no other choice.

For me, if a book can make me feel emotions that raw and sharp, it trumps absolutely everything else.

I also want to talk a bit about ethnicity, and how the fact that James is Chinese and his children are mixed-race works its way into the story. As the child of a Chinese father and a white mother, I was curious to see how that aspect of the book would be handled. And while the experiences of the Lees (particularly Nath and Lydia) were not and are not my experience — partially because of the 1970s setting of the book, and partially because I was not the only not-white kid growing up — they felt authentic to me, and I could relate to much of how they thought and acted and reacted. It’s hard to put into words the sense of knowing you are different but not feeling different, of forgetting that sometimes people will look at you and see an ethnicity instead of a person. I am fortunate to have only felt this way sporadically throughout my life — for some, as it is for James in the book, I know it is constant — but EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU does an excellent job of conveying how those times felt, sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, as it is in life. Being Chinese — or half-Chinese, or married to a Chinese man — does not define the whole of who the Lees are, but is instead a thread woven through their being, informing every aspect of their lives, whether or not they are conscious of it.

As for the plot — the mysterious circumstances surrounding Lydia’s death, what led to them, and how the family reacts — I found it simple, but never straightforward or boring. As in real life, there are multiple forces at play here, and though the plot itself isn’t complex — a girl dies, and her family tries to make sense of her death — the real story here is in the nuance. It’s impossible, after putting down the book, to cite any one reason or cause for Lydia’s death. It’s a culmination of her whole life, of her parent’s lives, of her siblings’ lives, and all the choices and hurts and slights and misunderstandings and pressures running through each. When we finally reached the night of Lydia’s death in the narrative and everything was explained, it wasn’t the “a-ha!” moment one typically expects in a mystery, but more a quiet, “of course.” For really, this isn’t a mystery about the death of a teenage girl, but a story about a family’s complex relationships with each other. Not a line or an arc, but a web.

Ultimately, EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU is a beautifully crafted tale full of honest emotion and raw truth. Though it is quiet, the gorgeous prose and heart-wrenching story kept me riveted from the first page to the last, and will keep my thoughts spinning for some time to come.

Film Review: INSURGENT

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This past week I got the opportunity to catch an advance screening of Insurgent, the sequel to last year’s action-packed YA blockbuster Divergent. I’ll be honest, I was on the fence about this one. While I was pleasantly surprised by the first movie, the trailers for the second left me scratching my head. The entire first teaser appeared to be either a dream sequence or a fearscape (one of the drug-induced hallucinations characters in the franchise’s dystopian Chicago face to prove their bravery) — is it a red flag when a movie has to advertise using a scene that has nothing to do with the actual plot? — and the full trailer strongly hinted that the adaptation would be deviating in a big way from the book.

Box? What box? The box isn’t in the book. What’s in the box? (Anyone else unable to read that question in anything other than the traumatized voice of Brad Pitt? Just me?)

But since the first film had exceeded my trailer-based expectations, and since the second book was my favorite of the series, I went into Insurgent with an open mind and cautious hope.

Insurgent opens shortly after Divergent leaves off. Tris (Shailene Woodley), Four (Theo James), Caleb (Ansel Elgort), and Peter (Miles Teller) have sought refuge in the peaceful Amity compound outside the city limits while they try to determine their next move. Meanwhile, Jeanine (Kate Winslet), head of the Erudite faction, has gotten her hands on the aforementioned Mysterious Box, and is obsessed with finding a Divergent who can open it. Hence Eric (Jai Courtney) is leading a group of Dauntless soldiers around attempting to round up Tris and her ragtag group of rebels.

Obviously, chaos ensues. And continues to ensue for the entirety of Insurgent’s 2-hour running time. Which, if you read the book, is about what you’d expect from its adaptation; neither version of the story is short on action sequences.

However, I did take some issue with the way the action unfolded. In both the book series and the movies, Tris becomes a far more competent soldier and leader in the second installment. But while the book version of Tris also develops a more mature and measured way of thinking and problem solving, even if it means making hard decisions, the movie version did away with that pesky nuance, instead opting to have her lash out violently any time she was placed in a tough situation or in a conversation with someone she didn’t like. This did lead to some fun fight scenes, and yes, I suppose one could argue that it made Tris “strong,” but for me, I would’ve liked a bit more strength of character and a bit less strength of temper and fists.

As a sidebar, it was kinda odd seeing Shailene Woodley in scenes opposite literally all of her previous YA movie love interests. I mean. She’s had a really good past few years professionally, but it’s starting to get weird.

TJ: Divergent is the best.
MT: SAY THAT TO MY FACE.
TJ: I just did. I punch people A LOT in these movies. What did you do in Spectacular Now? Cry?
MT: Not as much as SOME people.
AE: Uh, guys? I’m right here.
TJ: I TAKE MY SHIRT OFF TOO.
AE: I took mine off in Fault In Our Stars. AND my leg.
MT: OH SNAP.
Shailene Woodley: Hate to break this up, but we’re supposed to be filming an awkward scene with all four of us now, okay? Okay.

As far as acting goes, Insurgent boasts a lot of heavy hitters in the cast, but I felt that a lot of them failed to deliver. While I was surprised by how well both Shailene Woodley and Theo James handled their roles in the first movie (despite my complete inability to buy him as an 18-year-old), in this one, they were lacking for me. Naomi Watts, whom I usually like, was surprisingly unconvincing as [highlight for minor spoiler: Four’s presumed-dead mom — who, despite the fact that she is 16 years Theo James’ senior in real life, only looks about 5 years older on-screen], and Kate Winslet, whom I love and adore, had such an odd over-the-top role to play that even her innate Kate Winslet-ness had trouble saving it. I also had trouble connecting with Ansel Elgort’s character, but I’m not sure that’s entirely his fault, as Caleb isn’t exactly Mr. Personality in the books either. However Miles Teller was a wonderfully pleasant surprise, stealing every scene he was in, and Jai Courtney was a sufficiently menacing baddie. So a bit of a mixed bag, for me.

There were also, as I mentioned before, tons of plot changes, both big and small. As often happens in movie adaptations of books with large casts, many characters’ roles were truncated, given to a different character, or eliminated altogether. Subplots were altered and rearranged. And of course, the Mysterious not-in-the-book Box is the central point around which the entire movie’s plot rotates.

While I am not a book purist when it comes to film adaptations — I mean, I thought the Hobbit trilogy was great fun, fanfictiony and ridiculous though it was — I do wish that the filmmakers had taken a little more care to make their Big Changes actually make sense. The logic behind the Mysterious Box is frail at best, a theme that carries through a lot of the narrative choices in the movie.

Characters fight to the death over a misunderstanding that is later cleared up with a single sentence. Characters are shown in no-hope-of-escape scenarios in one scene and then happy as a clam back at their home base in the next, with no explanation how they got there. Bad guys hatch elaborate plots, then they unfold using set pieces put in place before the plot was hatched.

Basically, abandon hope, all ye who seek logic here.

However I don’t want to come across as a big ol’ downer telling you to avoid this movie at all costs. There are some great fight sequences, and anyone hoping to see Shailene Woodley kicking some serious bad-guy booty will be over the moon. There are some huge — albeit a bit video gamey — nifty CGI sequences. There is some surprisingly great comic relief in the form of Miles Teller, whose character I absolutely loathed in the book but kind of adored in the movie. And if Tris and Four (whose shipper name I don’t know, but if it’s anything other than FourTris, which would clearly be pronounced fortress, I quit) are your jam, then you’re in for a treat, as the romance is definitely amped up from the book.

Ultimately, my thoughts on this movie are that if you’re okay with the movie being its own, separate-from-the-book thing, or if you’re there for the action, for the romance, for the high-stakes adrenaline-pumping pace, or for the futuristic dystopian setting, you’ll probably really enjoy it.

If you’re more about tight storytelling and source material faithfulness, this may not be the film for you — or you just need to go in knowing not to place too high a value on those things.

No matter what, if you decide to check out Insurgent at the theater, I hope you have fun, and I’d love to know your thoughts!

Check out the video below for the Drive Through Movie Review Clint Redwine and I filmed after exiting the theater, in which I say “like” way too much, coin the term “Bovine Dystopia,” and do a bad impression of Caleb running. You’re welcome, Internet.