Continuing the popular young adult series, Allegiant is the third film in The Divergent Series. Picking up where Insurgent left off, there’s been a change in regime in this dystopian view of Chicago: the factions are gone, Four’s mother is now in charge and there’s a whole world to be discovered beyond the city walls.
Shailene Woodley is back as Tris, who spends most of the film looking concerned, whilst her love interest, Four (played by Theo James) gives a similarly one-note performance of looking vaguely angry. To be fair, they’re doing the best they can with a strained script, full of clichéd lines about doing what’s right and how they all need to work together. Miles Teller provides some comic relief as Peter, but even he has some incredibly hammy moments. There are also plenty of plot holes to keep the audience puzzling over through the more boring science-y explanations, of which there were far too many.
Considering how much money presumably was spent on this film, some of the special effects are just awful. There were honestly some of the worst uses of green screen in this film that I’ve seen in a while. It feels like every second moment there’s some new flashy device that’s introduced, either a futuristic weapon or a floating building, and most of the time it feels totally unnecessary: at best it’s distracting, at worst it’s laughable.
Having re-watched the trailer, I can honestly say there is nothing more in the film that is of that much interest. The trailer not only gives away the whole of the plot, but is a pretty solid summary of what happens. If you want to continue on with the series, I would recommend skipping this film and just watching the trailer, which condenses the good bits of the film into three minutes. The other hour and 57 minutes are mostly just dodgy effects and a clichéd script and could quite happily be missed.
Image: RedCarpetReport; Flickr.com