Dystopia never felt so familiar
YOU’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING PRECISELY LIKE ALLEGIANT
For those who have lost track — it has been a whole year since the previous chapter — the Divergent series is not the one where a bunch of young people, united despite their opposing factions, escape from a walled prison in a dystopic future to discover what lies in the blasted wilderness beyond. That’s The Maze Runner.
In this one, a bunch of young people, united despite their opposing factions, escape from a walled CITY in a dystopic future to discover what lies in the blasted wilderness beyond. Welcome to Allegiant; you’ve never seen anything exactly like it.
Chief among the escapees is Tris Prior, played with admirable grit if not quite Jennifer Lawrencian steel by Shailene Woodley. When last we saw her and her comrade/ boyfriend Four ( Theo James), they had just dispatched Chicago’s autocratic leader ( Kate Winslet) and learned of a mysterious community of others beyond the city walls.
As Allegiant opens, those walls have been closed by the city’s new leader (Naomi Watts, who as Four’s mom should really be called Three). Tris and Four, along with Tori (Maggie Q) and Christina (Zoë Kravitz), scale the barricade — the 1960s Batman would be proud of their wall-walking — to find out who or what is out there. They bring Tris’s brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and also Peter (Miles Teller), because a backstabber keeps everyone on their toes.
What they find at first looks as though someone had tried to build a world’s fair on Mars, and then given up because of the lack of atmosphere. Of course, if that were all there were this would be a brief story, and there would have been no need to chop the final book in the Divergent series into two parts.
And so they come upon David (Jeff Daniels), one of those executives who believes that good leadership starts and ends with fine tailoring, but who can’t distinguish between smarm and charm. His penthouse digs, and the small city-state that surrounds them, have a distinct DNA theme woven into the architecture, which is a pretty good indication of what he obsesses over. Why have a straight staircase when you can double-helix your way to the top?
Divergent spends a good deal of its two hours letting Tris and Four come to differing conclusions about the motivations of David and his minions, while quick- witted audience members (and even a few relaxed- witted ones) will be busy shouting things like: “No, that’s the bad guy!” And: “Behind you!”
Not that everything is immediate apparent. Director Robert Schwentke and a trio of writers ( one of whom also worked on The Maze Runner; surely a conflict of interest) dangle in front of us such questions as: Who are those scruffy ruffians populating the desert? Why play a groovy holo- recording when you could just step up and tell Tris who you are? And how is it that all future societies seem to eat out of a combination of Tupperware and pewter dishes?
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Watts’ character is learning what revolutionaries and even a few official opposition leaders have discovered: It’s far easier to seize power than to wield it. Clearly, Tris and her party are going to have to return at some point to sort things out.
Mind you, I thought the film was over when she remarked: “Maybe it’s time to start embracing everyone instead of dividing them into groups.” But no; Allegiant the movie is just the first half of Verionica Roth’s Allegiant the book. Part two, due out in a year and called Ascendant, will answer all the remaining questions, except the obvious one: Why do they keep turning last-chapter books into bloated, two-part sequels? Ω ½