A group of young, attractive rebels fights against an oppressive regime confining them to an elaborately constructed post-apocalyptic testing ground. Thus goes the plot of The Hunger Games. No, wait, that’s The Maze Runner. Hold up, that's actually also the plot of Veronica Roth's Divergent series. This year's second installment of the film franchise, The Divergent Series: Insurgent, barely registered a blip on the critical radar before Jurassic World lit the box office on fire. But that doesn't mean there's not more.
Next up: Allegiant, which is the title of the third book—but the first half of the final chapter of the film series. Where Insurgent pitted Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James) as Factionless leaders against Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet) as a leader attempting to mind control all the citizens of future Chicago, Allegiant sees our protagonists go beyond the outer walls—which have been sealed for 200 years—to explore what's been going on at O'Hare. (Roth's books didn't really have a great sense of scale.) The first trailer gives away a good amount of what’s going on, and the whole feeling of rats escaping an enclosure and confronting the architects of that maze doesn't bode well for original storytelling. But hey, there's still Naomi Watts, Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, and Zoe Kravitz alongside newcomers Jeff Daniels and Bill Skarsgård—and the booming score that signals YA dystopia. So there's that.
Pause at: Eh, don't bother.
Essential Quote: "We're saving the city."—Tris (Woodley)
