Allegiant

What goes up must come down, right? It’s a rule that applies to everything including the movies. So for a while teen romance vampire movies were all the rage. An army of would-be imitators came along and what started as a minor movement because a major glut. And then somewhere along the way, enough cheap, poorly made, lazy Twilight knock offs were made that it put a stake through the heart of that particular film phenomenon. It’s a common occurrence with almost any movie fad. This weekend, I think I may have finally seen the beginning of the end of dystopian teen films adapted from Young Adult novels. Allegiant, the third film in the Divergent series, is lazy, half-hearted, unconvincing, and brainless.

The film inexplicably continues the story of Tris Prior, a teen who, like Katniss before her, discovers she is an unwilling messiah figure destined to bring down the repressive authoritarian government that thinks it can dictate what people are and where they belong. I’ve talked before about how the recent boomlet in young adult dystopia novels is basically an example of adolescent anxiety writ large, and that continues to be true. But what the Divergent series fails to do is offer anything new. While there are new plot developments in Allegiant, there are no new ideas.

It turns out that the divided post-apocalyptic city of Chicago is actually just a big experiment being conducted by scientists who are just over the big wall that contains the city. They’ve been watching for years, hoping to find one person, a divergent person naturally, who is genetically pure. They plan to use that person’s genes to find a way out of the genetic mess that was made when earth went all post-apocalyptic. Of course, any time an older person in a suit smiles and tells a teenager that they just want to help in one of these films, you can bet that things aren’t what they seem.

The older person in the suit in this film is Jeff Daniels who seems simultaneously embarrassed and bored.

Shalaine Woodley returns as Tris Prior. As she runs across barren, irradiated landscapes and blasts at bad guys with high tech machine guns, she makes a singularly unconvincing action hero. Woodley lacks the grit, gravity, and physicality it requires to believe her in this role. She mostly comes across as that really nice student body president who got the lead in Romeo and Juliet because her dad knew the director. It’s not that she’s a bad actress per se, it’s just that she’s the wrong one for this role.

The other supporting characters return for this film including Theo James as Four, the most lethal Calvin Klein model on earth, Zoe Kravitz as the best friend who does so little, you don’t even remember her character’s name, and Miles Teller as the traitorous Peter. His character is as predictable as a Swiss train, but at least it’s fun to watch him twirl his metaphorical villain mustache.

As the Hunger Games films progressed, their budgets became larger and their special effects more elaborate and refined. The last two Divergent movies made plenty of money, so it’s not clear why the special effects look so very cheap. In particular, early scenes with Tris, Four, and the others marching across the irradiated wasteland that surrounds Chicago look so fake they might well be called the Kardashian sequence. Most of it clearly filmed on green screen soundstages and even the characters’ shadows were clumsily digitally generated. 

Allegiant doesn’t go through the effort of fashioning real characters or explaining plot points. It just lazily gestures in the general direction of those things and assumes that’s enough for audiences. Unfortunately for everyone involved including the audience, it’s not. Unfortunately, not only does this film bring dystopian sci fi down, it brings the audience down too.