Allegiant takes Tris and Four past the wall that has hemmed in their city for two films, and what waits on the other side is not a revelation but a waiting room. Robert Schwentke directs, working from a script by Noah Oppenheim, Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Stephen Chbosky, and the film runs 120 minutes. It is an adventure, a science fiction story, an action picture and, by its own tagline, a mystery. “The truth lies beyond the wall,” the poster promises. The wall, it turns out, is the best part.
Trailer, via eOne UK.
The Bureau of Genetic Welfare
Beatrice Prior and Tobias Eaton leave the fence and are taken into protective custody by a mysterious agency called the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. Its leader, David, played by Jeff Daniels, sits them down and explains the architecture of their entire lives. Chicago is walled off from the outside world as part of an experiment sanctioned by the US government, one meant to produce genetically-purer Divergents from a genetically-damaged population. That damage, David says, came from a failed attempt to correct human genes.
It is a clean idea, and the film states it once, plainly, and then spends its remaining time walking corridors. The Bureau is a part of the US government. That is the whole of the outside world we are given, and it is a lobby with better lighting.
Tris, Four, and the Company They Keep
Shailene Woodley returns as Tris, Theo James as Four, and the film keeps its cast intact around them. Miles Teller is Peter Hayes, Zoë Kravitz is Christina, Naomi Watts is Evelyn Johnson-Eaton, Ansel Elgort is Caleb Prior, Octavia Spencer is Johanna Reyes, Keiynan Lonsdale is Uriah Pedrad, Daniel Dae Kim is Jack Kang, Maggie Q is Tori Wu, and Bill Skarsgård is Matthew.
The novel this film adapts, Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, was published by HarperCollins in October 2013 and closes the trilogy she began with Divergent in 2011. Roth wrote the book from two perspectives, Tris and Four both. The film does not. It hands the whole story to Tris and lets Four stand beside her, which flattens the one structural idea the source had going for it.
What the Journey Costs
The film’s best stretch is its first act, before anyone leaves. Evelyn has become Chicago’s leader, and all factions now live equally with the Factionless. Tris, Christina and Cara confess their part in the insurgency and are pardoned. Then Tris learns from Four about the rebel group called Allegiant, which wants the faction system restored.
A confrontation between faction members and the Factionless kills several people, among them Edward, Evelyn’s right-hand man. Cara and Johanna Reyes, the Allegiant’s leaders, plan to remove Evelyn and send envoys outside the city. Tris is chosen for the expedition, along with Tobias, Cara, Christina, Peter, Uriah and Tori. Tris asks Tobias to free her brother Caleb from execution and bring him along.
Then Tori dies, killed by the Factionless as the group flees the city. Maggie Q has been in this series since the start, and the film spends her death like loose change. The survivors escape and meet Amar, Tobias’s mentor, long presumed dead. He takes them to the Bureau and to David.
The Two-Part Plan That Wasn’t
The trilogy was meant to end as a two-part film. The first part, The Divergent Series: Allegiant, opened on March 18, 2016. The second, called Ascendant, was planned for June 2017. It was redeveloped as a TV movie and then canceled outright.
That history is worth naming, because Allegiant was built as half a story and plays like it. Four weeks before Roth’s novel arrived, a free electronic companion, The World of Divergent: The Path to Allegiant, went online. The marketing machine was thorough. The storytelling was not.
Here is what the film gets right, in order of how much it matters:
- The premise past the wall. A government breeding Divergents out of a damaged population is a real idea, and David delivers it with a straight face.
- Jeff Daniels. He is the only person on screen who seems to know what movie he is in, and he does not blink.
- The faction politics back in Chicago. Evelyn holding the city together by force is more interesting than anything the Bureau offers.
- The cast. Woodley and James are fine. They were fine last time. They will be fine next time, if there is one.
The truth lies beyond the wall.
The tagline is the film’s own summary of itself, and it is a promise the Bureau cannot keep. What lies beyond the wall is an explanation, and explanations are cheap. The first two films ran on a city that graded its children and threw out the ones who did not fit. That city had rules a viewer could feel. The Bureau has a policy memo.
The published audience score sits at 6.1 out of 10, from 7,106 votes. That is the right number. Allegiant is not a disaster; it is a stall. It moves its people from one enclosed space to a larger enclosed space and calls that progress. The Divergent series had a genuine asset in Tris and Four and a genuine problem in a plot that kept deferring its own payoff. Splitting the last book in two guaranteed the deferral would outlast the audience.
What matters here is not the wall, or the Bureau, or David’s experiment. What matters is that the film ends where a middle chapter ends, waiting for a part two that never came. Ascendant was canceled. That makes Allegiant not a first half but a dead end, and no amount of cast or premise fixes a story that stops on purpose and never resumes.
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