Monday, March 21, 2016

Allegiant (2016)

Image result for allegiant movie poster
“You want change without sacrifice, you want peace without struggle. The world doesn't work that way.”

            Allegiant is the third installment of the Divergent series. Yes, I do realize I have not yet watched and reviewed the second movie Insurgent but I just finished reading the books I know what happens… or at least I thought I did because the movie is so much different from the book.
            Allegiant sees Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), Tobias Eaton (Theo James), Caleb Prior (Ansel Elgort), Christina (Zoe Kravits), and Peter (Miles Teller) climbing the wall that separates the factions from the rest of the world. Their factioned world has fallen apart with Tobias’s mother, Evelyne (Naomi Watts) having seized control and showing no mercy to those who supported Jeanine Matthews’s ruthless killing of Abnegation and Candor memebers. They are climbing the wall after seeing a message from an aunt of Tris’s saying there is life beyond the wall. The group goes to see what that life could be. They come upon world that is still in the midst of radioactive fallout and looks like the surface of Mars.
            They are found by this bureau that does genetic testing. Tris finds out that she is not Divergent she is what is known as genetically pure which is why she was immune to all the formulas Jeanine was trying to give her. Tobias was thought to be Divergent as well but turns out he is not genetically pure. The bureau’s leader David explains that Tris’s entire world was created as some genetic experiment decades before but it backfired because the qualities they gave some people were too much and they had other personality traits. For example, Erudite people were smart but assholes.   
            Tobias teams up with this girl Nita who is from the bureau. She takes him on an outing to watch is called the Fringe where the genetically damaged live. Turns out David has the parents killed and the children of the murdered parents are given a serum to forget their former lives and they are brought to the bureau for a new life. Tobias decides to leave to head back to Chicago on his own. Tris, Caleb, and Christina are not far behind and they are able to stop Evelyne and Peter who is a traitor, from delivering the serum that makes people forget.
            Let me just say that the movie changed so much from the book. At first it kind of pissed me off because there is changing a few things here and there from the books and then there is completely changing things. And yes I do know it is unfair to compare book and movie but I am going to do so. In the book, the outer world is just like a neighborhood outside of a major city. There are still houses and streets. It does not look like the surface of Mars. A lot of characters and plot points were taken out of the movie that were in the book. Some of the left out plotlines and characters I completely understand but there was so much that was added that was not in the books. I am not too crazy about how futuristic the movie world is when the book world still has a foot in the old world. Looking back on the books compared to the movies, I do fully understand the need to change some of the plotlines and to not add some of the characters. In Allegiant the book the characters are so damn whiney! And the story is so extremely slow it is almost painful. The ending for all the main characters is actually seriously anticlimactic just like this movie was. Although there is supposed to be a second Allegiant movie so god knows how much more dragged out the story and how changed it will be compared to the books.
            Once again the cast was good. Miles Teller, his character of Peter is such a fucking asshole but I love him! Teller makes the character tolerable because he is such a smooth talker and never looks like he takes the character seriously at all with his acting. Theo James is a hot piece of ass who just so happens to act. Shailene Woodley makes an excellent lead she fits Tris so well.
 
            Allegiant was alright. As I rambled on about I do understand some of the changes to the movie from the book but so much of it was changed that it almost felt like a completely different stories with the same character names and the main idea of the books. Not sure if I would have liked Allegiant more if I had not read the books and knew what happens because I am not super into YA stories and Allegiant is one hundred percent marketed towards teens. 

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