★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
If your only exposure to the Divergent series was through their marketing, it’d come as somewhat
of a shock to find that it’s actually another dystopian young adult franchise, not an
arthouse drama following a group of stranded teens attempting to get down from a tall
building. Seriously, look at the one-sheet for Divergent:
Look a bit stuck, don’t they? As if they didn’t quite think
the whole thing through. Things don’t improve in part two…
After a quick change of hairstyles (more aerodynamic,
maybe?), the star of Insurgent and
her cohort were a bit too keen to
reach the bottom.
And now, we reach part three in the series: our central
lovers (accompanied by some concerned friends) have slowed things down a bit,
tackling the descent with a dubious minimum of safety equipment. This careful approach defines Allegiant as a film: playing it safe.
The last instalment ended with the revelation that Chicago,
home city of our heroine, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), is a massive
scientific experiment controlled from without. We very distinctly saw the gates
of the city opened, and the inhabitants tiptoeing out onto pastures new. Within the first thirty seconds of Allegiant, however, the gates are closed and the masses make an awkward
U-turn, trudging back to the squabbling and infighting they were apparently desperate
to break away from.
Tris, Four (Theo James) and company are forced to climb their way
to freedom over the wall. Once beyond, they encounter The Bureau, a scientific order that
surveys Chicago in the pursuit of discovering genetic purity. Overseer David (Jeff
Daniels, practically trolleyed onto set from his role in The Martian) informs Tris that her divergent nature singles her out
as ‘pure’ (read: chosen one) amongst her ‘damaged’ peers, and that she has key
role to play in rebuilding the damaged world.
For a brief period, and despite my extreme lack of interest
in the two previous movies, I found the opening act oddly gripping: we get punchy action set pieces with some nicely experimental sci-fi tech on
display. However, this intrigue only carries the film so far; right until the
CGI drones and bubble capsules are deployed not as world-building but active
plot staples brought into play because the characters simply aren’t involving
enough. Woodley is ferried from scene to scene, reverting back to the motionless, stale-faced approach that so vehemently
turned me off the first Divergent,
and James (despite having a far more active part) glowers from under his
eyebrows ad infinitum. At the very least, Miles Teller seems to be having fun as Peter (the Edmund
Pevensie of the group), but I can’t imagine the role of 'unlovable buzzkill' is any great stretch.
Skewed in favour of image over insight as the first act may
be, it’s at least preferable to later stages which completely lose desire
for any kind of vitality: as the signposted twists and turns unfold with box-ticking predictability, screen-time is split between the orange wastelands
surrounding The Bureau and the civil war in Chicago, of which very little is
actually depicted (presumably most of the budget got spent on rendering the Mad Max-y backdrops). Both concurrent
climaxes are insipidly bloodless.
This hectic to-ing and fro-ing squashes character moments into paper-thin slivers and the extensively gunplay amounts to little significance when the finale is nothing more than a superficially altered re-tread of the previous film’s conclusion. Six hours into this series, it’s apparent that the only true divergence is from Veronica Roth’s source material, in order to stretch a three-book amalgamation of production-line YA tropes across three (soon to be four) ploddingly pedestrian films.
