The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (7 out of 10) Directed by Francis Lawrence; Written by Peter Craig and Danny Strong and Suzanne Collins; starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth; rated PG13 (intense sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images and thematic material); in wide release everywhere; running time: 123 minutes.
This is a good movie. A really good movie, but only in the sense that it is a part of something larger. It doesn’t even begin to stand on its own, but it acts as a very solid first act of an arc to what we can hope is a brilliant second part next year.
Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) is in District 13 after the events of the Quarter Quell from “Catching Fire”, the second movie in this four piece trilogy. She is suffering from Flashbacks and anxiety. She has PTSD, and feels guilt for the loss of Peeta (the tiny Josh Hutcherson).
The rebellion, led by President Coin (Julianne Moore), and Political Advisor turned rebel activist Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his last roles before his untimely passing), needs to unite all of the Districts together in order to have a chance at prevailing against the Capitol and President Snow (Donald Sutherland). And to do that, they need a flag for everyone to rally around. Or in this case, a face that they all know.
And that would be our own Katniss Everdeen.
I love dystopian fiction, but I have to admit feeling a bit burned out by it in the YA section. Especially since so much of has a binary emotional approach, with little world building beyond the “big idea”. One of the things that the Harry Potter books (and by extension the movies did right) is take some time to build out some small amount of nuance to the expanded world outside of the main characters immediate needs.
“Divergent” on the other hand, did not. The overwhelming feeling I got there was a smug congratulatory pat on the back by the author and filmmakers about their cleverness.
I had a bit of that same feeling on the first “Hunger Games” movie, though it was executed much better. I tried to read the books and could barely get through the first one before throwing in the towel.
And then something weird happened in the second movie. The world seemed to open up, and it just wasn’t solely about the central conceit of the Games thing. It was about the characters, all of them in some kind of pain, and it was about the bigger world that they lived in.
This third movie doubles down again on that, but this time it takes its time to look into the logistics of revolution, the politics of revolt, and the propoganda of hope. Heady stuff from a movie based on half of a final installment in a YA fiction series.
It is not an action packed entry, we can probably expect that to hit, and hit hard, in the final installment out next year. It is a thoughtful, deliberately paced meditation on stepping up to responsibility. Something that it took Harry Potter 7 movies to do, and Anakin Skywalker 6 movies. And it does it more believably by showing the cost.
It isn’t perfect, it is still beholden to its YA roots too much. But it is definitely fighting hard to rise above that, and throw off the shackles of cliché and broody self-important melodrama.