'Allegiant' Is A Portrait Of America As It Is And Will Be: Obsessed With Guns

A promotional clip for Allegiant — the third film in the Divergent series, following 2015’s Insurgent — shows its Alpha Male & Female, Theo James and Shailene Woodley, sharing a ‘Big Kiss’. They do so atop the wall that has kept them trapped/safe, for their entire lives, within the oh-so-symbolic future-dystopia of a sci-fi Chicago, where the population is divided by a cast system that separates them into eternal high-school cliques: hippies, geeks, jocks, doormats, etc. Gazing upon the blighted desert stretching out beyond the wall, they see a whole other world, but also a symbolic horizon; and in the face of a now-limitless future together, they seal it with a kiss.

But the Biggest ‘Big Kiss’ in Allegiant comes later on, when, after a stint — and endless rounds of futuristic weaponfire — apart, our lovers are reunited. Again they kiss, but this time, with much more unintentional symbolism, they do so astride a pile of freshly-murdered dead bodies; the camera pressing in, and tasteful music swelling up, so we think only about the passion on their lips, not the blood on their hands.

Where Divergent once started out as YA soap-opera full of heaving teen hormones, three films in — and with one more to come — the series has quickly become another cookie-cutter action franchise. Killing is its business, and business is good. Allegiant — a dour, joyless work of contractual obligation — is a portrait of rampant militarisation; one that presents violence, stand-over tactics, and war as both the cause of and solution to seemingly every problem.

It begins in the bones of Old Chicago, where — as is the way with Totalitarian societies — the toppling of the old regime has just brought in a new one; Kate Winslet swapped out for Naomi Watts, the same system kept in place. Jackbooted junta goons stalk around wielding semi-automatics, there’s a weirdly-robust armada of armoured vehicles for a walled-in utopia with no Heavy Industrial Manufacturers faction, and every street begets another checkpoint. In such a military state — where even the hippy faction has gathered a cache of weapons and rebranded themselves as guerrilla militia — there’s no justice like angry mob justice. The dissidents of Insurgent’s uprising now bray for the execution of old collaborators, delighting as rich, creamy justice is administered one bullet-to-the-head at a time.

"There’s also an obsession with genetic purity; meaning, yet another utopia is actually a dystopia. Shocker."

Escaping their war-zone, our principle cast — James, Woodley, Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz — scale the wall, wander through a toxic, radioactive wasteland (apparently a walled-in city can be not just a political enclave, but an isolated ecosystem), and suddenly find themselves in a different kind of sci-fi movie. “Welcome to the future!” pronounces pseudo-tour-guide Bill Skarsgård, ushering our escapees into a CIG wonderland of hoverships, pernickety architecture, and floating decontamination bubbles. Here, our fantastic five is showered and dressed in white; Woodley is taken under the wing of visionary Jeff Daniels; and we learn a whole different worldview, which offers a competing parable to the original.

Here, this second enclave — The Bureau! — is soon revealed to be a sci-fi surveillance state, filled with drones and cameras and facial-mapping technology and lots of swiping clusters of blue in the air. There’s also an obsession with genetic purity; meaning, yet another utopia is actually a dystopia. Shocker.

At first, the only one who sees the light is James; he becoming an action-movie cliché, as the angry, principled hero who sees through the lies. When presented with hard philosophical questions, he only grows more outraged; reaching his nadir of All-American idiocy when he shoots the pilots of the plane he’s in, preferring to wield his weapon then ride out a fucking plane crash rather than engage in sociological debate. Woodley, meanwhile, is being seduced by being in the seat of power; her haute couture white dress symbolising a loss of all her old values.

Soon, though, she rediscovers her “conscience”; changing her frock for military garb, ditching her speeches-to-futurist-congress for daring escapes and discharged weapons. It’s time to go back to war in Ol’ Chicago, to shoot a shit-ton more people, to meet violence with violence. Allegiant’s dystopian-future parable is a portrait of America as it is, always was, and, in grim cinematic visions, apparently always will be: obsessed with guns. Here, there’s no problem that can’t be solved by wasting everyone you don’t agree with. And, then, once you’re done, you can get fresh amidst the carnage.