‘Allegiant’ trailer reaches new levels of dumb

Movie poster for Allegiant scheduled for release in March 2016.

photo via wikipedia.org under Creative Commons license

Movie poster for ‘Allegiant’ scheduled for release in March 2016.

The Divergent film series has proven to be one of Hollywood’s most unoriginal franchises based on a YA novel, stealing material from Harry Potter to Hunger Games and everything in between. With two atrocious films down and two more to go, the trailer for Allegiant wallows in every problem that made its predecessors so terrible, rather than improve upon them.

One huge problem right off the bat is the fact that the movie is split into two parts in order for Summit Entertainment to drain this saga of every penny they can until it reaches its untimely end. Originally, the movie was titled Allegiant Part I but now only titled Allegiant, as its sequel is now no longer being called Allegiant Part II and has changed itself to Ascendant, in an attempt to seem like it’s a standalone story, yet in reality is just an unnecessary second act to an equally intermission between the film prior.

It worked with the final Harry Potter, since its whole mythology is so epic and elaborate that one film wouldn’t be able to capitalize upon its full grandeur. It didn’t work, however, when The Hunger Games did it, as Mockingjay Part I was so overdrawn and, frankly, boring. As expected, Allegiant most definitely heading into Mockingjay Part I territory.

With that aside, the trailer itself, though a teaser, fails at doing its job which is, unsurprisingly, to tease the audience. Fifty percent of the trailer is just footage from the previous films, which is a cheat in it of itself, but what makes it worse is that it’s all edited together in such a sloppy fashion. The whole trailer as a matter of fact is extremely choppy and has no real sense of flow or transition.

The trailer also manages to feature everything that made the last two so awful. There’s the disgusting oversaturation of special effects, the mind-numbingly moronic story and the stilted acting performed by a cast of incredibly talented actors who are all painfully wasted.

Regardless of having a few significantly poor films, Shailene Woodley has still proven herself as a strong performer within those films  — even in the first Divergent, which was still an abomination. But once Insurgent came along, her lack of interest with the role along with the decline of an already horrid script resulted in one of her worst performances to date, perhaps her first account of truly bad acting. Other great actors such as Miles Teller, Naomi Watts and newcomer to the franchise Jeff Daniels all seem to be falling victim to that same problem.

The first Divergent film was a rote, painfully boring piece of garbage, while Insurgent was a ridiculous, mind-bogglingly stupid piece of garbage. Allegiant seems to be somewhere in the middle, as it possesses the dull nature of Divergent, as well as the nonsensical nature of Insurgent. Nevertheless, it’ll most likely be as horrible as its predecessors, if not worse.