With the Hunger Games having ended its saga last year, The Divergent series now carries the mantle of dystopian young adult saga du jour. The third and penultimate installment of the series, Allegiant , heads to theaters on March 18, and the film looks to be a little different than its predecessors. That's because, for the first time in the series, Tris and Four are going to venture outside the confines of Chicago by heading over the wall that surrounds the city. In doing so, they discover a strange new world unlike anything they, or the audience, has seen before. It's so starkly different from the rest of the series that many fans are wondering where Allegiant was filmed.
Much of the new film looks like it takes place on the surface of Mars, or at the very least on some Jordanian desert like The Martian. But believe it or not, Allegiant was filmed in the same city as Insurgent: Atlanta, Georgia. All of the filming took place in and around the city, and since Atlanta isn't known for its vast, otherworldly deserts, you can bet that those landscape scenes were filmed on a sound stage in front of a green screen. You'd never know by watching the movie that they're not actually on some wasteland, and this is due to the seamless CGI work on display. But this isn't the first time a film has used CGI to create a convincing landscape. Here are 11 other examples from the past decade when the practice really came into vogue.
1. The Avengers
Did you really think New York City was destroyed by aliens? The Battle of New York was really the battle of the sound stage.
2. Avatar
The alien moon of Pandora might be the most convincing fake world ever created, as new technologies were invented specifically to bring it to life.
3. Gravity
Believe it or not, this wasn't filmed in outer space. Crazy, I know.
4. Jurassic World
The dinosaurs weren't the only things that were created by special effects in this film.
5. Tomorrowland
You mean this wasn't filmed at Disneyland? Now I don't know what to believe.
6. Pacific Rim
Like in The Avengers, the city being destroyed, in this case Hong Kong, was created from whole cloth.
7. The Lone Ranger
Ah, the American Frontier... created on a computer.
8. The Great Gatsby
Old-timey New York obviously doesn't exist anymore, so it had to be recreated. Some of the other set creations seem like odd choices, though.
9. The Maze Runner
Spoiler: There is no maze!
10. 300
Ancient Greece probably was never this stylish, and that's because almost the entire movie was filmed on green screen.
11. The Hobbit
Did this series use too much CGI? That's up for debate, but the fact remains that very little of what made it on screen was real.
Obviously, Allegiant is just following the current industry standard of shooting on a green screen for when an exotic (or sometimes not so exotic) location is required. The effect is pretty seamless, though, and goes a long way toward giving the land beyond the Chicago wall the alien look it required.
Images: Lionsgate Films
