The Divergent Series: Allegiant

When this current decade ends in just four short years, will we look back on The Hunger Games as one of the more influential films?  After all, it's spawned numerous imitators, both in print and on the screen.  The past few years have seen numerous teen adventure stories set in post-apocalyptic worlds, such as The Maze Runner, The 5th Wave, and the series we're looking at today, Divergent.  The latest entry, Allegiant, is par for the course with a lot of these stories.  It's watered down Sci-Fi for teens built around a romance between two attractive but uninteresting leads.

I actually enjoyed the first Divergent movie from two years ago.  It had an interesting lead performance from its young star, Shailene Woodley, and its futuristic world was able to capture my imagination.  My interest faded with last year's sequel, Insurgent, which took everything that worked about the first movie and kind of diluted it.  The characters weren't as interesting, the performances felt off, and the plot felt overly familiar to the other teen Sci-Fi stories we have been getting lately.  In this latest entry, there seems to be even less to care about.  Woodley's character, the female heroine Tris, has gone from interesting to bland.  She's seldom allowed to emote or raise her voice above a dull monotone.  Likewise, her relationship with the handsome Four (Theo James) is shaping up to be about as dull as dish soap.  There is absolutely no passion or chemistry between the two actors when they're on the screen together, and they often seem bored when they talk to one another.  Funny, they seemed a lot more lively and likable in the first movie.  I don't know what happened.  All I do know is that with each passing film in this series, I'm finding I could care less.

The plot kicks off immediately after the events of the last film, with the post-apocalyptic city of Chicago in chaos.  The evil Jeanine (played in the last two films by Kate Winslet) has been defeated, and the citizens who were under her thumb are now screaming for justice, and asking that her followers be killed in mock trials.  Four's mother, Evelyn (Naomi Watts), supports this decision, and wants to lead the city in a new direction.  However, there are some in Chicago who feel that Evelyn is just making the same mistakes Jeanine did during her cruel tyranny.  There is a war beginning to brew between Evelyn's supporters, and the supporters of Johanna (Octavia Spencer), who stand against her.  Tris can see the war brewing, and wants no part of it.  She simply wants to climb the walls that surrounds her city, and see what lies beyond in the world.  She gathers up her friends, including Four, her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), her close friends Christina (Zoe Kravitz) and Tori (Maggie Q), and the slimy and sarcastic Peter (Miles Teller), and manages to flee from Evelyn's forces, and scale the wall.

Tris makes it over the wall, but things don't seem much better on the other side.  It seems to be an endless and ravaged wasteland, where the earth is scorched and the water that falls from the sky is a rusty blood red.  Tris and her friends are soon rescued by a group of people who have built a society out in the ruins of the land outside of Chicago, and created a thriving community in the ruins of O'Hare International Airport.  Here, the people of this society watch what's going on in Chicago, and bring children from various dying cities to safety.  But is everything what it really seems?  Their leader is David (Jeff Daniels), and if his shifty and uneasy smile is enough to tip you off that he's the new villain in the plotline, then you're smarter than Tris, who trusts him wholeheartedly for a majority of the film.  There's a lot of talk of the characters slowly coming to the realization that David does not have their best interests in mind, combined with a lot of action sequences and special effects that never really thrill like they should.  When all is said and done, the movie is simply killing time for the final entry in the series, due to be released in June of next year.

Allegiant seems to be built around two kinds of moments - Those where very little happens, and those where too much seems to be happening.  In their effort to split the final book into two films (which is the norm for these kind of movies), the filmmakers are forced to simply tread water and fill out the running time with a lot of scenes that go nowhere.  Given how dull and lifeless these characters have become over the course of these movies, there's very little to get invested in here.  Seriously, the people in this movie need hobbies or something, because everybody either speaks in a straight monotone, or with sarcastic detachment.  Maybe the actors (and there are some talented ones here) just don't know how to make this dialogue work.  I can't blame them.  The lines they get to read is often straight and dull, or sometimes unintentionally hilarious.  Even Miles Teller, who is supposed to come across as the sarcastic comic relief in the film, seems embarrassed by some of the one liners he's forced to utter in this one.  Nobody in this movie gets to display a personality, because everybody is simply a mechanism in a much bigger machine, which is the plot itself.

That's not to say there's no entertainment value at all here, though I wonder how much of it is intentional.  The climax is absurd in a 1950s horror kind of way, with a cloud of red mist threatening the characters that acts like no cloud of mist I have ever seen before.  There were also a few lines that caused me to chuckle, though again, whether this is intentional is up for debate.  Even the technology in this futuristic society seems kind of hokey.  Tris and her friends are carried from the savage wastelands to the safety of the new society in these very silly looking bubble suits that allow them float around like, yes, bubbles.  Maybe it came across as being more impressive in the original source novel, but the special effects artists obviously did not have the budget or the imagination to make this seem real or even plausible.

Allegiant feels like a shell of a movie.  It's set in a Sci-Fi world that never captivates, filled with people with no personality, and built around technology that fails to impress.  You have to wonder if the people involved even have their hearts in this anymore.  Much like the last movie, it's just going through the motions and cliches of the genre.  When it was over, I wasn't asking myself questions that the ending set up.  I was asking if the fans were still going to care when the last movie comes out 15 months from now.

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