Photo Courtesy of Tribune News Service – Maggie Q, Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller, Zoe Kravitz, Theo James and Ansel Elgort in “The Divergent Series: Allegiant.”
2 out of 10
‘Allegiant’– starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Jeff Daniels, Naomi Watts
By Henry Nallen
THE ROUNDUP
The popular teen saga known as the “Divergent Series” has been around in Hollywood for a number of years; however, film adaptations of book series have gone from bad to worse.
The “Divergent Series” is a notable name in it’s competitive genre of teen action-romance, but it has never been thought of as an original idea. It was often just the movie to see in between “The Hunger Games” releases.
While it didn’t present any new or surprising content from it’s competitors, the first film “Divergent” was watchable. It was engaging and fun.
It’s sequel, “Insurgent”, released one year later, was a lot less interesting, as nothing of any importance really happened.
However, neither movie came close to the abomination that was “Allegiant”.
All three movies had wonderful casts with many recognizable stars, such as Kate Winslet, Naomi Watts, Jeff Daniels and Octavia Spencer, but no amount of A-List stars could can cover up a poor movie.
The plotline of the third film was unlike those before and radically changed the point of the story.
In the first two movies, the main focus is good versus evil and who is in charge of the community where they are living. In this installment, we learn that there are people living outside their community and watching them as an experiment.
The primary goal in “Allegiant” appears to be finding life outside of their sheltered community, which the protagonists do in the first 20 minutes of the movie. The rest of the film is mainly just CGI action scenes.
In the second half, their goal changes to stopping a poison gas that is not even fatal to the citizens.
The people behind the production of the movie seemed to be more focused on incorporating every new CGI effect possible than coming up with a decent storyline.
Following the trend of popular teen trilogies, “The Divergent Series” is planning on splitting the last book into two films, making “Allegiant” part one.
However, due to the unimpressive total of only $37.2 million in the box office, the budget for part two will be cut down.
