You want change without sacrifice; you want peace without struggle. The world doesn't work that way.

The Divergent Series: Allegiant (2016)

6.0/10 on IMDb
12% on Rotten Tomatoes

Chloe's thoughts: Low-energy entertainment
Watch it if you: Like the Divergent series; Have seen the previous films and are curious about this one
Ahh, at last we've come to the third and final installment of the Divergent series. Yup, that's right, they split this film into two parts just like all the other franchise series out there! Which was really confusing since the title says nothing about it being part one of the third novel?!

I did a quick Google search of it, and the movie has been referred to as "The Divergent Series: Allegiant", "Allegiant", and "Allegiant: Part 1". Please make up your mind! Luckily I did this search before I watched the movie, so I knew that there was a high possibility the movie wouldn't actually end the series, but that was still disappointing.

Anyway, rant over, let's move on to the movie.

I will just straight up put it out there: this movie is pretty bad.

This didn't surprise me, though, since the novels weren't amazing and the first movie was pretty bad. The second movie was, and still remains, the best in my opinion, but mainly because they changed a lot of the novel's elements and tried to incorporate more chances for action scenes and crazy visuals effects.

They tried to do the same in this film, but unfortunately it just didn't work.

It's not that the action scenes were not welcomed. In fact, they were probably the best part of the film. But the film (including the action scenes) tried to be smart, groundbreaking, and really epic, but everything just ended up being... subpar.

For example, the visual effects obviously tells the audience that they are trying to be really cool and a really futuristic sort of film, but it ends up just being tacky because the quality is not there, especially seeing as this is a franchise film with a good budget. I suppose the effects of this are compounded because I watched The Jungle Book recently, which has done nothing but raised the bar for visual effects.

Another instance of them trying too hard is the cringe-worthy dialogue. It's almost as if they got their target audience wrong and wrote the script keeping in mind easily-pleased five-year-olds.

Aside from that, the acting was decent, but I think the actors lacked proper direction, and so you are left to feel like there's something that's still lacking.

As to the plot, a lot of it seems to be all over the place. There are definitely notable themes about this film, particularly about genetic superiority, discrimination and segregation, however these don't really come to the foreground among all the general noise that's happening in the film. They added quite a few things to the novel's plot so that they could make up the time to fill a movie, and this was pretty obvious. There were quite a number of scenes that just seemed unnecessary. However, this does lead to the one plus about this film: there is always something happening. Even if this results in overcrowding the film, at least your mind is always focused on something, good or bad. The film kind of did the opposite of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. Instead of looking at everything from the book in detail, this film actually changed the source material substantially, adding in all sorts of filler elements. However, this did end up watering down the character development and making relationships between characters less convincing.

In the end, there's not much going for this film except some B-level action sequences and explosions. It's enjoyable if you want to watch it just for mindless entertainment (and, let's face it, no one went in to this movie thinking it would be amazing), but it's not something that you will want to talk about the day after.