BEFORE: Wrapping up another franchise - I read that there was supposed to be a fourth film, called "Ascendant" but this third film in the series didn't perform as well at the box office as someone hoped it would, so plans for one more film were scrapped. Yeah, that's not a good sign.
The good news is that I've caught up with my planned schedule, by not taking a skip day on Tuesday, so I'm exactly where I wanted to be. Today I was supposed to figure out that last bit of movie year, to make sure I can get from Halloween to Christmas, but I kind of ran out of time, I spent part of today walking to the German pork store to get cold cuts and also pick up a sandwich for my wife from a place near there. She works from home, so really, anything I can do on my day off to get her a bagel or a sandwich or some donuts, I'm happy to do, and of course get something for myself, I have to eat lunch too.
Shailene Woodley and another 18 people carry over from "Insurgent".
THE PLOT: After earth-shattering revelations, Tris must escape with Four beyond the wall that encircles Chicago, to finally discover the shocking truth of the world around them.
AFTER: Yeah, I kind of see the problem here, every film in this series has plenty of action, but not so much as to be overwhelming, just kind of a whelming amount. And each film kind of tears down the whole story parameters from the last film and comes up with all new ones, so there's a bit of a "What's the point?" feeling to it all. Why set up a bunch of conflicts and challenges and then one film later, present such a completely new situation that the challenges from the last film are quickly forgotten and almost seem pointless. We've come a long way together, Divergent series, but you keep changing your mind about everything and it's a little bit annoying. It's like your friend or life partner that doesn't want to hang out with you at any of the old places, but you were just sort of getting used to them as part of your routine.
What happened at the end of the previous film was that the residents of future Chicago learned that they may not be the only city that survived after World War 3, the mystery box contained a message that indicated that they were only led to believe that, and that Chicago with its factions was some kind of grand social experiment, to see if dividing people into forced social classes would be a better way to live than before, when people just chose random paths in life on whims or based on what they were GOOD at, because, you know, some people are just WRONG about what they're supposed to be doing with their lives, and the world needs farm workers and janitors and ditch-diggers, too, hell sometimes there's a drop in police or firefighter enrollment rates and some cities don't have enough people to do important municipal tasks, and then everyone isn't as safe. Hell, in the future they don't even have enough city workers to drive the subways, they just made the trains all automatic and you have to jump on. So clearly somebody realized they had to assign people to worker classes to keep people fed and safe and happy.
Except it DIDN'T work, did it, it just created resentment and anger between the classes, and other problems within the class, like people joining Dauntless when they're no good at hand-to-hand combat, hell, Tris couldn't even TAKE a punch when she joined, let alone throw one. How is that helping the overly-militarized de facto police force? And if she can't punch someone else, how do you expect her to shoot them? Wait - no, I stand by that. You have to walk before you can run, so maybe you have to punch before you can shoot. She got tougher, but it took a lot of time, almost all of that first movie, and like I said, nothing from that movie even matters anymore.
The old corrupt female villain leader is dead, and the new corrupt female villain leader is in charge, and the first order of business is killing anybody who was loyal to the old regime. They've proven they can't be trusted, they can't be retrained, and it's not like there's some miracle drug that can be inhaled that would make them forget their old lives so they can start again. (Not yet, anyway, but hey, give it a minute.). So they have to die, but that includes Tris' brother, Caleb, who started helping out Jeanine at the end of the second movie, and even though everything has changed, Caleb still ended up on the wrong side of history so he has to be executed.
Not so fast, because Tris and Four manage to sneak him out of his cell and take him to a FAKE execution, in front of some Dauntless guards, while Evelyn and other Factionless & Candor people are executing everyone alphabetically, and what luck, they're still only on "B". Christina arrives with some phony documents and they make it look like a prison transfer, but really, all of them, plus Peter for some reason, are really headed out over the wall. Whatever's out there in the wastelands - people, no people, radiation, scary monsters, it's just got to be better than Chicago after the fall. Or not, but hey, whatever, it's good to take a road trip regardless.
They do find a bunch of soldiers, in a hidden city, and they're taken to the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, and I'm sure everything from that point is going to be absolutely fine, no problems, clear skies ahead, welcome to the wonderful New Frontier. JK. But they do get confirmation that Chicago was one big social experiment, and people have been watching them for the last 100 years, like they were on Big Brother or The Truman Show, so the five of them that got out are kind of like celebrities.
Caleb and Peter get new jobs in the surveillance department, and they get to monitor the events taking place in Chicago with hundreds of camera drones or something, almost like another form of V.R. Four and Christina join the new military, and they go on missions to villages in the wasteland and they rescue children, taking them away from their terrible lives surrounded by toxic radiation and well, just what ARE they doing with the children they bring back? Probably not important, only Four's getting a bad vibe from the missions they send him on.
Meanwhile, Tris, who's now being told that her being Divergent is GOOD, is meeting with David, the man in charge of it all, who explains that the Chicago experiment was designed to bring someone like her into being, someone who's "Pure" and capable of doing so many things, when the rest of the Chicago residents, hell, maybe all of the other people on earth are then by extension "Damaged", and maybe by studying her, they can help more damaged people become purified. Yeah, that language isn't very concerning at all, it sounds very noble, right?
Also meanwhile, back in Chicago the group formerly known as Amity is tired of being farmers and pacifists, and they've changed their name to Allegiant, and they're not happy with the fact that now that Erudite's been overthrown, the Factionless have taken over, and they're even worse. Four's mother Evelyn is just the next Jeanine, and I think there's kind of a metaphor there that may have some relevance to our current election year. You can change the person in charge, but if you don't improve the SYSTEM at the same time, the next leader's just as likely to become corrupt as the last one. But no, by all means, keep supporting Trump, even though you KNOW what he's capable of. That makes it worse, like I can see people voting for him back in 2016 when they maybe just didn't know what a terrible, corrupt person he was, but now they've SEEN that he's a racist, narcissist, egotist, sexist and yes, LAZY person who is incapable of getting anything done, and they're still supporting him. It's a form of madness, there's no other explanation.
Something's brewing here in NYC, too - there are no details yet but some agencies have been investigating the mayor and his close associates, phones were confiscated, which means that somebody's looking for SOMETHING, and today the NYC Police Commissioner resigned - a sign that somebody's also getting close to some corruption. Now, it may just be that commissioner's twin brother acting as a sort of "fixer" for nightclubs, showing them ways they can bend or break the rules and not get prosecuted, but who knows, it may go a lot deeper than that. The thing about being the NYC Mayor is that you can elect someone who doesn't seem corrupt in any way (Koch, Dinkins, De Blasio) but you know, just give it a couple years, they'll figure out ways to get some action on the side. De Blasio was putting his own wife on every commission and committee there was, and she had no qualifications for public service. Now Eric Adams seemed like a very honest guy when he started, but it's two years later and maybe it's a different story now - look what happened to Giuliani over time, now he's bankrupt and one step away from prison. The only mayor who maybe couldn't be corrupted was Bloomberg, he had so much money that he didn't need to take bribes, I don't think he even took a salary as mayor because it would have been a cut in pay for him. Anyway, it's possible that Chicago kind of works the same way, but I wouldn't know about that.
Anyway, back in future Chicago, just as the Allegiant are set to attack the Factionless, Evelyn wants to use the amnesia gas provided by David and delivered by Peter to make everyone forget their old lives, and she's going to create a new society where she's in charge, and then everyone will just think she's always been in charge and she was elected fairly and is not corrupt in any way. Jeez, this sounds like something the Joker would do in Gotham City, doesn't it? Just saying. But Tris, Caleb and Christina arrive to free Four from his cell so he can go all Jason Statham on the guards, and they can all try to stop Evelyn and Peter from gassing everyone. Then all they have to do is change the Bureau of Genetic Welfare to the Bureau of Nothing to See Here, close down Chicago again to the outside world and then figure out how to move society forward again, what with everybody being so Damaged and all. Yeah, good luck with all that, but I'm out.
If they never make that follow-up TV series, it's fine by me. If I really wanted to know how the story's supposed to end, I'd read the plot summary for the book. But it seems that for "Insurgent" and "Allegiant" the filmmakers changed SO MUCH from the book when they made those movies, there's really no point. I'm just going to take their advice, just close down the gate, shut out the world and try to move on. Remember, this is one of those cases where I've got at least 20 different paths I can take out of here, I just have to pick the one that I know will get me to horror movies in 16 or 17 steps and hope for the best.
Also starring Theo James, Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Zoe Kravitz, Maggie Q, Ray Stevenson, Mekhi Pfifer, Daniel Dae Kim, Octavia Spencer, Naomi Watts, Kelynan Lonsdale, Ashley Judd, Janet McTeer, Jonny Weston, Leonardo Santaiti, Konrad Howard, Lucella Costa, Rebecca Ray (all 18 carrying over from "Insurgent"), Jeff Daniels (last seen in "The Answer Man"), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 4"), Rebecca Pidgeon (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Xander Berkeley (last seen in "Proud Mary"), Nadia Hilker, Andy Bean (last seen in "King Richard"), Zeeko Zaki (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), Joseph David-Jones (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Josh Duvendeck, Parisa Johnston (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Theo Howard, Amy Parrish (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Ken DuBois, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Project Almanac"), Ian Belgard, Toshi Calderon, Anna Stevenson, Bari Suzuki
RATING: 4 out of 10 decontamination showers
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