It feels wrong to write something negative about the awkwardly titled Hunger Games; MockingJay, Part 1. There's a phenomenal amount of stellar writing, locked-and-loaded acting, crisp photography and haunting images in this penultimate movie of the best of the innumerable dystopian-whatever teeny franchises. In the theatre I saw a trailer for the second Divergent flick, which is related to this film in the way poodles and wolves technically share an ancestor. There's a ferocity and a specificity underlying the Hunger Games that the many imitators lack. Suzanne Collins' novels are raging about the state of our culture and in particular our media, the soullessness and patheticness of what we're becoming. The films don't play quite as rough (have to protect that PG13), but the rage remains. This is a brutally efficient movie. It's the creak of a bowstring as the arrow is drawn back, the oiled click of a rifle bolt. And that's the issue. For two hours we sit and watch and wait for the arrow to fly. But not yet, and that can't help but be unsatisfying.
Like the 7th and 8th Harry Potter films, the decision to split the Hunger Games finale is driven by money. That earlier franchise went out of its way to re-invent the penultimate film, with mostly positive results. Harry Potter and the Whatever, Part 1, is a road movie in a fairly constrained series, a gorgeous meditation on friendship and struggle, something unique in that world. It is, to my mind, the most patient and adult of the series, and works independently as a lovely tone poem at feature length. The Hunger Games doesn't have the opportunity for so much differentiation. The stage may be different, but the orchestra is playing the same notes. Arrows fly, pain spikes, Jennifer Lawrence runs and rages. All expertly executed, all mesmerising to watch. But what you aren't sure is how to feel afterwards.
It says something about this series that, when tasked with filling two new and fairly important roles, it called upon the great actors Michael K. Williams and Julianne Moore. These are not people accustomed to wasting their time in pointless or unchallenging projects. Williams is a model of strength, charisma, and no little wry humor. Moore has the bigger and flashier role. It makes me eternally happy that Phillip Seymour Hoffman spent many of his final scenes sparring with her. In the next film, Moore and Donald Sutherland will hopefully have the chance to spit a lot of ice at each other. You'll notice the pattern here; In the next movie….
The actors are so good that we almost don't notice how little is happening. Except, oddly, for Lawrence. She's never less than appealing, but it occurs to me that she's called upon to do a lot more acting in this film than the predecessors. Those movies called on her to explode under pressure, to play fear and adrenaline and fury. This movie is quieter, and she spends much of it sparring with actors who, for the moment, may be a bit out of her weight class. It's a more internal role, politics rather than war. She comes alive with the bow, snarling lines into a camera. There's an amusing scene of Katniss struggling to act. I wish it didn't hit so close.
This is a powerful film, loaded with the kind of imagery that in lesser hands would feel exploitative. It evokes Naziism and Slavery. Its subject is the power of media and spectacle to distort the worldview of the watcher, subject and object twisting about one another until the results are horrifyingly unrecognizable. Katniss is given a camera crew and we wonder only why it took so long. She is the ultimate star, her authenticity carefully drawn out and recorded in pre-selected war zones.
Notice that when the camera requires a still subject, someone to stand and talk as diversion for a geurilla raid, the crew turns to Finnick. He is a broken man, but switches on for the show and plays his role flawlessly. Katniss is the opposite. She can only be herself in the desperation of combat, and if a camera happens to be nearby, then so much the better. The movie places her in danger and pain over and over, but only to run in circles. Her frustration feeds into the authenticity. When she destroys a hovercraft, it's the most genuine she's been in ages. The MockingJay is a fighter, not meant to be caged. She is a creature of action and dynamism. One wishes that the movie would act accordingly.
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