Movie Reviews
Following Divergent and Insurgent, Allegiant is the third installment in this series. And just like other young adult series such as Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, the final book the series is based on will be smeared out over two movies. Due to the financial disappointment that came with the release of Allegiant however, the final movie (which will be called Ascendant) will not get a theatrical release and will instead be released as a TV movie. That should already tell you something about Allegiant.
At the end of Insurgent, the people of Chicago got rid of the totalitarian regime and headed for the walls, curious to find out what was behind them. Unfortunately their new leader Evelyn (Naomi Watts) doesn’t want them to find out what’s on the other side and puts the place on lockdown, while at the same time getting rid of everyone who was part of the old regime. Feel free to draw a parallel to what is happening in Turkey right now.
This doesn’t stop Tris (Shailene Woodley), her not-entirely-there boyfriend Four (Theo James), Peter (Miles Teller) and a couple of their friends though. Her friends’ characters are so underdeveloped and underutilized that they might as well have remained nameless.
They escape over the wall, only to find a radioactive wasteland in which it’s tough to survive. Just when things become even more hopeless when they run into an ambush set up by Edgar (Jonny Weston), Tris and her friends are rescued by a bunch of soldiers who chase off Edgar and take the group to the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, a highly advanced city led by David (Jeff Daniels). There they find out that Chicago was an experiment set up by the government in order to attempt to restore society’s problems, which were caused by messing about with people’s genes. There’s a lot more I could write about this part, but honestly… who cares?
If Allegiant proves anything, it’s that sequels are never as good as the original and that some stories aren’t meant to be dragged out. They would have been better off calling this a day after Insurgent. Instead the promise of easy money prompted both the writer of the books and the people involved with the movie, to drag things out. In return we are treated to a story that is average at best and nonsensical at its worst. Sure, the movies moves along at a swift pace and there’s plenty of action along the way. But the story is predictable as hell and characters simply move through it from point A to point B. At some point, David wants to unleash a memory-erasing gas in Chicago… something I would have welcomed myself at that point.
