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Director: Robert Schwentke

Writers: Noah Oppenheim, Adam Cooper

Runtime: 121 min

Main Cast:

• Shailene Woodley as Tris
• Theo James as Four
• Naomi Wattas a Evelyn
• Octavia Spencer as Johanna
• Jeff Daniels as David
• Zoë Kravitz as Christina
• Ansel Elgort as Caleb
• Miles Teller a Peter
• Keiynan Lonsdale as Uriah

Review: by Erika T

Admittedly I have only read the first Divergent book.  So beyond that, I can’t attest to how accurate this movie adaptation is.  All I know is because this movie had to follow the Harry Potter trend like the other popular book to movie adaptations, we have to endure two “final” movies of book three.  This time though, instead of calling it part 1 and part 2 they’ve named the last movie something different.  But Allegiant is what we have in the meantime.

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In the aftermath of Insurgent Tris (played by Shailene Woodley), Four (played by Theo James) and their crew must risk it all to get beyond the wall that has been separating downtown Chicago from the rest of the world for centuries.  That is the only way for them to discover the truth.  Once there, everything they’ve ever known will come into question. And the consequences of their choices will be huge.

What I Liked:

Honestly, after Insurgent I didn’t think I’d be interested in watching any more of these films. I didn’t really like the story in that one and the 3D was unbearable. But clearly the chance to see Theo James again won out.

I have to say this movie looked more expensive than the other two. There was more action and I found the story a little more engaging than the second film. The ending wasn’t quite as much of a cliffhanger as one would expect for a final books split into two films. But still, the end was met with a few groans in the audience.  If you don’t want to sit around waiting a year for the conclusion you might want to wait for the next film to come out and then watch this one on DVD or something.

The best actor here of the team was Theo James for me. He really commands the role and you totally buy that he’s a badass. He had the best choreographed action sequences in my opinion and his scenes felt more intense than the others.

What I Didn’t Like:

Even without the 3D there were a couple of scenes where the camera work was really shaky.  I almost had a headache. It was as if the director was holding it on his shouldn’t as opposed to having it a proper rig. Thankfully it wasn’t in most of the scenes.

I think the weakest links of the cast were Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley. Particularly with Miles as Peter, the script’s shortcomings shone through.  It’s like they had to resort to making him have all of the funny one-liners to give the character personality and likability, but it just didn’t work for me, especially considering the history of the character.  Shailene as Tris is supposed to be Mrs. Badass to Tobias’s Mr. Badass, but she just wasn’t believable.  There was a scene in particular where she’s walking the halls with gear on and a gun and it looked more like she was in a laser tag tournament than in the belly of the beast, trying to save the day.  Her physical acting for the role, which is very important to an action flick, was weak.  It made me think she should reach out to Keanu Reeves for some pointers (if you haven’t seen him training for John Wick 2, just click here and you’ll see what I mean:

She was glaringly far from anything like that.

You can find more of Erika’s work at Your Urban Fantasy!

Images Courtesy of IMDB