Once The Hunger Games hit as big as it did on the big screen it was seemingly a race by Hollywood to find the next big franchise to follow. Much like Twilight inspired a number of failed franchises in the fantasy action genre aimed at tweens, the Jennifer Lawrence franchise inspired an attempt to go after the post apocalyptic teenage action franchise. Most of them have failed to find box office success, as well as critical success, but the one that seemed to have found a path to being more than just a failed franchise starter has been the Divergent franchise.
A post apocalyptic future where humanity remains in Chicago, humanity has split into a number of warring factions based on personality types. Each type is also responsible for a certain job function within the city. Having been declared “divergent,” or an equal amount of each personality type, Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley) is caught between worlds.
Defecting to one faction, she winds up in the middle of a geopolitical war among the groups that changed the way the world ran when we meet her in Divergent. The next film in the series, Insurgent, follows her as the new society spawned from the fall of the old fell on its own. With a brand new world to explore, the way in which Beatrice views her world is going to change radically leading into the franchise finale Ascendant.
While it never has blown up to the point where The Hunger Games did, the Divergent series has been able to find an audience (and be able to be made for cheap enough) to continually find a nice profit level as well as be a fairly solid franchise. This isn’t a brilliant film series but it always manages to find its way to be perfectly acceptable entertainment.
And that’s what Allegiant is at its’ heart: perfectly acceptable. This isn’t a franchise that’ll crush box office records, like a comic book franchise, but it’s managed to do the two things that a studio loves: make money and not be completely embarrassing.
There’s a number of interesting pieces here. They don’t get much beyond the EPK level but they do get into how they crafted the film from the novel, and a number of the themes of both are touched upon.
Summit presents The Diverent Series: Allegiant . Directed by Robert Schwentke. Written by Noah Oppenheim and Adam Cooper & Bill Collage, based on the novel by Veronica Roth. Starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Zoe Kravitz, Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Naomi Watts, Jeff Daniels, Octavia Spencer. Run Time: 121 minutes Rated PG-13. Released on DVD: 7.12.2016
