Chris At The Pictures

If your only exposure to the Divergent series was through their marketing, it’d come as somewhat of a shock to find that it’s actually another dystopian young adult franchise, not an arthouse drama following a group of stranded teens attempting to get down from a tall building. Seriously, look at the one-sheet for Divergent:

Look a bit stuck, don’t they? As if they didn’t quite think the whole thing through. Things don’t improve in part two…

After a quick change of hairstyles (more aerodynamic, maybe?), the star of Insurgent and her cohort were a bit too keen to reach the bottom.

And now, we reach part three in the series: our central lovers (accompanied by some concerned friends) have slowed things down a bit, tackling the descent with a dubious minimum of safety equipment.  This careful approach defines Allegiant as a film: playing it safe.

The last instalment ended with the revelation that Chicago, home city of our heroine, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), is a massive scientific experiment controlled from without. We very distinctly saw the gates of the city opened, and the inhabitants tiptoeing out onto pastures new. Within the first thirty seconds of Allegiant, however, the gates are closed and the  masses make an awkward U-turn, trudging back to the squabbling and infighting they were apparently desperate to break away from.

Tris, Four (Theo James) and company are forced to climb their way to freedom over the wall. Once beyond, they encounter The Bureau, a scientific order that surveys Chicago in the pursuit of discovering genetic purity. Overseer David (Jeff Daniels, practically trolleyed onto set from his role in The Martian) informs Tris that her divergent nature singles her out as ‘pure’ (read: chosen one) amongst her ‘damaged’ peers, and that she has key role to play in rebuilding the damaged world.

For a brief period, and despite my extreme lack of interest in the two previous movies, I found the opening act oddly gripping: we get punchy action set pieces with some nicely experimental sci-fi tech on display. However, this intrigue only carries the film so far; right until the CGI drones and bubble capsules are deployed not as world-building but active plot staples brought into play because the characters simply aren’t involving enough. Woodley is ferried from scene to scene, reverting back to the motionless, stale-faced approach that so vehemently turned me off the first Divergent, and James (despite having a far more active part) glowers from under his eyebrows ad infinitum. At the very least, Miles Teller seems to be having fun as Peter (the Edmund Pevensie of the group), but I can’t imagine the role of 'unlovable buzzkill' is any great stretch.

Skewed in favour of image over insight as the first act may be, it’s at least preferable to later stages which completely lose desire for any kind of vitality: as the signposted twists and turns unfold with box-ticking predictability, screen-time is split between the orange wastelands surrounding The Bureau and the civil war in Chicago, of which very little is actually depicted (presumably most of the budget got spent on rendering the Mad Max-y backdrops). Both concurrent climaxes are insipidly bloodless.

Based on the best-selling teen novel by John Green, The Fault In Our Stars is a romantic drama depicting the story of Hazel and Gus (Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort), both saddled with debilitating afflictions. Despite their constant companions of an oxygen tank and a prosthetic leg respectively, their mutual love for the unconventional and shared acerbic wit brings them inexorably together, whilst Hazel’s wavering condition threatens to pull them apart.

 

One of the best things a film can do is prove you wrong, to show you something that you didn’t expect from something you thought would only irritate you…and that’s exactly what The Fault In Our Stars is. The trailer made it out to be another heartless, airbrushed Hollywood romance that simply used the cancer element to gain cheap weeps from the audience. In reality, the film earns those tears (and trust me, there will be a lot of them) and the very instant it seems like the story is going in a predictable and wishy-washy direction, it picks up an unexpected plot development and beats you over the head for thinking so little of it.

The greatest strength the film has to offer is Shailene Woodley: having been not only unconvinced but very annoyed by her in Divergent, I still find it hard to believe that it is actually the same actress. Her performance shows a level of maturity and devotion to her character that is astounding, retaining the innocence of someone who does the best with what they have and the tortured soul of a young woman desperately clinging to life lest it toss her into the void. Ansel Elgort also carries a similar degree of child-like innocence as Gus in order to stay level with Hazel and help her make the best of unbearable circumstances. The two leads bounce off each other well during the initial awkward phase and by the end I think you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t utterly believe that the two are hopelessly in love.

A healthy degree of black comedy is also woven into the film, split between the two leads and Nat Wolff as Isaac, a close friend of Gus who is slowly losing his eyesight. Laura Dern (who we’ve seen far too little of lately) is endearingly believable as the concerned and protective mother while Willem Dafoe lends an almost nihilistic air to the proceedings which is kept in-check to prevent it spilling over into the main narrative. The focus is kept almost constantly on the two lovers, the cinematography remaining intimate but not intrusive throughout, not bothering itself with over-extravagant establishing shots but keeping the eye of the audience entirely at the level of each character. 

The film is not entirely perfect, no matter how hard it tries. The opening twenty minutes feel a little tangled as the film attempts to balance the realistic tone with some very awkwardly written dialogue, and some otherwise heartfelt moments are almost ruined by a selection of pseudo-intellectual and overly philosophical statements that probably worked fine in the book, but on-screen feel forced and unnatural.

The Fault In Our Stars is a deeply felt, heart-breaking story of two people who find comfort and peace in the arms of one another despite fearful odds. Soaring past average expectations thanks to powerhouse performances, an unflinching but understanding attitude towards illness and some of the most beautiful moments of recent cinematic history, it should not be missed. Bring plenty of tissues.

4 Stars

Joking aside, it is astonishing just how much the faction system feels like a rip-off of Harry Potter (the sorting hat-like selection process) and The Hunger Games, the broken city of Chicago in which the film takes place resembling a slightly less flamboyant version of Panem, complete with futuristic security systems and a high-speed train connecting one end of the city to the other. Also, in a post-Hunger Games world, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Beatrice (later referred to as ‘Tris’ to assume her independence within a new faction) is no Katniss Everdeen. She has none of the intuition, determination or charisma of the role that Jennifer Lawrence now dominates and that is a problem. 

Woodley’s lead performance being the blank-faced shambles that it is prevents any kind of investment, and I spent most of the first half of the film wondering how a girl who was born into a faction that chastises vanity always manages to have perfect hair and make-up. Even the supporting cast cannot solve the problem: Theo James (who I will always remember as the guy who spent the last few minutes of The Inbetweeners Movie with poo on his upper lip) spends the entire film staring at everyone from under his eyebrows, and Kate Winslet as the shadowy head of the Erudite faction just looks bored all the way through. But the most problematic thing about the performances is that as a result, the relationship that begins to develop between Tris and Four (James) feels rushed, unbelievable, and forced.

The pacing is all over the place, the film dedicating around half an hour of its already stretched 139 minute run time to the first stage of Tris’ training, which means that the more important and hard-hitting elements towards the end are simultaneously rushed and make the film feel even more drawn-out. The set design too is all over the place, with seemingly no logical connection between locations, the atmosphere switching between dark caves lit by harsh red light and bright exterior rooftops despite the fact that the story is supposedly set within the confines of a single city. 

The soundtrack is an oddly dis-jointed mixture of musical score and songs, with composer Junkie XL sinking yet further in my estimation by apparently just re-using his score from 300: Rise of an Empire, which itself was just Hans Zimmer’s Man of Steel score minus the brass section. The songs themselves (minus M83’s rather uplifting ‘I Need You’) are just a depressing reminder that in this day and age, ‘From and Inspired By’ albums are being prized over actual film scores. 

Now I can’t deny when I left the screening there were some teenage members of the audience who appeared to have enjoyed themselves, and were in deep discussion surrounding the inevitable sequel that will be spawned from the next book in the trilogy, but I just left feeling rather empty. Divergent desperately wants to be the next Hunger Games but falls so short on everything besides visual flair and unobtrusive sound design that it doesn’t seem fit to scavenge the left-overs.

1.5 Stars