Allegiant
Year: 2016
Rating: PG-13
Length: 120 minutes / 2.0 hours

For those following along at home, Allegiant is the third film based on the third book in the Divergent series. As I have made comparisons to The Hunger Games in each installment of these reviews, I will continue to not disappoint. Seems to me that the trend of splitting the last book of a literary series into two movies is annoyingly out of hand. Sure, having written the end of my own trilogies, I know there’s a lot of plot and sub-plots to bring to a conclusion. I also know that much of the Divergent series didn’t feel like it really did or said anything. Sure, there’s the nod to some political statement or worldview that’s relevant today, but honestly I want something that only the survivors of a post-apocalyptic future should have to solve.

Where the previous two films in this series really excelled in their portrayal of “simulations”, this film had absolutely none of them. This was a problem, mainly because the strength of the previous two films relied on the characters growing through their overcoming of the simulations. In this film, there seems to be no character development at all (and annoying Peter (Miles Teller) is still around), and even the CGI, which was pretty good in the prior films, felt flat and obvious (even to the point of being distracting). Sorry, Robert Schwentke, but this was not your best work.

Similarly, while this film does stop at a good place to allow the “part 2” conclusion to wrap up next year, I still feel lost as to what is happening and who the clear antagonist of this whole post-apocalyptic future is (which is a problem I had with the last movie). Maybe once I read the book this was based on I’ll be able to give a better assessment, but for right now I’m pretty much done with this series.

In a film that should be a strong finish to an OK series, I give Allegiant 2.0 stars out of 5.