There are films that change you, films that challenge your beliefs and films that shake you to your core. There are films that induce an existential crisis in you, that force a complete reconception of the world you’ve lived in up to that point. Some achieve this through difficult and realistic political talk, and some achieve this through mind-bending metaphysical debate.
And some, like The Divergent Series: Allegiant, make a change in you because it’s the first time you understand what it means to have cinema that isn’t made for you. This is a four-film series. Allegiant is the third of the four films, and the first of a two-part finale. That’s a cinematic release structure that demands intense loyalty, on par with The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and Twilight.
However, I can’t understand what draws people to this franchise. What is the escapist fantasy or the real-world connection that has earned this story a four-film franchise and millions of dollars in cast and crew paychecks, special effects work and advertisements?
Is the appeal simply affirming that “feeling different” is something legitimately special? Is it possible that Divergent legitimizes every bookish teenager and their feeling that they’re better than their peers, who are all cliquey sheep? Because if that’s it, I’ve been there, and that is something that you do not want to reinforce — trust me. But there’s enough in the world of young adult fiction to reinforce that, with every prophetic chosen one and hero of the revolution ever. What about this makes it so massive?
To say that I am baffled by The Divergent Series’ success is an understatement. I’ve absolutely no idea what inspires the loyalty that has gotten us all the way to the third film.
The said third film, Allegiant, picks up seemingly after the end of every other young adult franchise — the attractive youthful rebels have overthrown their evil authoritarian dictators and now have to rebuild the society of post-apocalyptic Chicago. Hero of the revolution, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), has chosen to take a backseat role, as Evelyn Johnson (Naomi Watts), mother of Tris’ main squeeze, Four (Theo James), drives through the standard post-revolutionary cleansing of the old guard, mostly through the old guard’s execution.
Tris is sickened by this and leaves Chicago for the world beyond, thanks to a message received at the end of the previous film, The Divergent Series: Insurgent, that told of the aforementioned world (the one that created their society as a vaguely defined experiment and still existed) beyond. Joined by Four and a gaggle of one-note characters played by great, young actors (Miles Teller, Zoe Kravitz and Ansel Elgort), she finds that the society that created their whole world as an experiment: the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. The dark secrets the Bureau holds must be unravelled to save Chicago and the world Tris loves.
And honestly, that isn’t even half the nonsense contained within Allegiant. It later devolves into a giant gassing plan (because remember kids, nothing is more cinematic than air slowly creeping over people, and there aren’t 100 films that have done this before) and that thing where the villain keeps appearing on different screens, taunting the hero as they try to stop her.
Specifically, Allegiant seems more wholesale ripping off of blockbuster tropes in attempt to give this film some closure (avoiding the problems posed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1). Admirable, but mistaken, given that it serves to genericize this film immensely. On the whole, the series remains little more than a bizarre collection of dystopian tropes cribbed from Gattaca and The Giver with the romantic focus and design aesthetics of The Hunger Games stitched into it.
But let’s talk about those design aesthetics for a second. Whatever there is to say about the storytelling in The Hunger Games franchise, you can’t fault the production design of those films. Every piece of Panem felt like it had a purpose, a reason and a story. Outside of a few stray pieces of noticeable CGI, it was all immaculately crafted and placed.
Without an ounce of immersion into Allegiant, I couldn’t help but sit back and stare at how cheap this film looks overall. It’s dominated by shockingly amateurish green screen that seems to cut the actors out of paper and paste them onto the background, like a third grade art project onto plastic-y CGI backgrounds. It’s rife with sparse designs that seem designed either “because we’re sci-fi” or because they had to rush through production rather than being due to any single-minded design aesthetic. There’s nothing interesting to look at on screen.
That is, except for the actors, who present us with this film’s most curious contradiction. Let me be clear: these characters are nothing. Partially by design and partially by sheer boneheaded wrongness, they’re all thin sketches and outlines seemingly pulled from a third edition of So You Want To Make a Ridiculous Amount of Money Writing Young Adult Dystopian Fiction?
Yet, the cast who plays these characters is not only loaded to the brim with fine actors, but each earnestly seems to be giving it their best. Shailene Woodley and Theo James seem to have legitimate chemistry and are trying to give their work some weight. Miles Teller is clearly having worlds of fun playing a massive rat-faced douchebag. Even the adults are having a good time, with Jeff Daniels, in particular, doing a wonderful job leaning into that “vaguely evil bureaucrat” thing he’s been doing recently and chewing just enough scenery to be interesting.
And it’s that central contradiction that leaves me most befuddled by Allegiant. When I see this, I see an assemblage of cliché pasted onto a cheaply made, flat-looking film populated by cheap, flat characters. I see nothing that every other young adult franchise doesn’t already do, and I see all the others doing it better, or at least first. At best, I see a message about how it’s good to be different, which I can get from basically everything, and at worst, I see a rather disturbing anti-intellectual streak that runs into the core of this franchise.
Yet all of these fine actors signed on, and people keep turning out to see a film that’s not the lowest common denominator. I can’t just blame it on the “lazy Saturday afternoon” audience like I can with Transformers.
No, I’ve got to accept that there’s a major franchise out there that just isn’t for me. And that’s okay. Not everything is for me, nor should it be. To demand that is the height of egotism and bad criticism. There are people whom this is for, and I hope they got all they wanted.
But I have to take you through the film as I see it. And to be frank, I just really don’t care about what I saw.
Grade: D (I guess?)
Opinion Editor | Brandon Wagner is a College Senior from God Only Knows Where, America studying Film and Media Studies with a minor in Religion. This is his first year for the Wheel, in a likely misguided experiment to be a film critic. When he's not writing on the biggest blockbusters or the films of Spike Jonze or Andrei Tarkovsky or Zack Snyder, he's writing on comedic television, the future of gaming as an art, or the relationship between audience and cinematic experience. In other words, Brandon Wagner has basically nothing else going on but this.
