Ryan McNeil
In times of conflict, sometimes it doesn’t matter who’s right so much as it matters who tells the best story. The actions taken could be justified or completely immoral, but could still be supported by the population at war if the powers that be frame their decisions the right way. Find the right icon and the right message? We will sacrifice our most precious gifts until the last enemy falls. The problem is that only some of the time is the story being told a story that is meant for the greater good. So how are we supposed to know which stories to believe, especially when so few storytellers know how their tale will end?
Sometimes a blockbuster comes along and delivers a script that is far more interesting that it has any right being. It’s becoming more and more of a rarity these days as many studios are treating scripts as an excuse to keep on CGI character battling another.
Beginning a short time after the events of CATCHING FIRE, MOCKINGJAY pt. 1 finds Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) far below ground in District 13, long ago thought to have been destroyed by The Capitol as punishment for an insurrection. Here, Katniss has reunited with her mother, sister, and dear friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth).
While obviously struggling with a great deal of PTSD, she is approached by former Gamesmaster, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to join a reorganized rebellion against The Capitol. Against her wishes, she is brought to the leader of the opposition, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), and proposed as “The Mockingjay” – a symbol of defiance that the entire country of Panem can rally behind. However, Katniss is skeptical.
The first problem is that The Capitol still has Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) as their prisoner. As much as her feelings for him were once feigned, it’s clear that Katniss now struggles with the fact that she escaped the games arena and he did not. What’s more, Peeta keeps showing up on state television denouncing his involvement in the uprising, and Katniss’ involvement too.
This inner conflict prompts Katniss to accept the role in the rebellion, in exchange for clemency for those she sees as prisoners of war.
So it is that Rebellion soldiers like Cressida (Natalie Dormer) and Boggs (MaherShala Ali) sheppard Katniss and Gale from pillar to post trying to catch the right rallying cry on-film. However, the closer Katniss & Co seem to get to The Capitol, the more dangerous the rebellion seems to become.
In some ways, it seems as though this is the talkiest Hunger Games entry yet. While there are some really well-executed action scenes, they are few and fare between. Instead, what permeates this film is planning and speaking. We watch attacks get planned, and counterattacks get planned. We listen to public statements, and then see those statements resoundingly rebuked by the other side. Back and forth…over and over…an intellectual battle for hearts and minds.
What this does is give The Panem Rebellion some true gravitas and make it evocative of the world we inhabit.
Whether we like it or not, our leaders rely heavily on propaganda to get us on their side. This can be achieved by working a soundbite into every interview, by rallying people under a banner, or by anointing someone as a folk hero for the cause. None of this has to be accurate or true mind you, it only has to be galvanizing. It has to be clear enough to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and unite the populace towards a greater good. It has been done for centuries, and will continue to be employed as long as the political game is played the world over.
In MOCKINGJAY pt 1, we watch closely as Katniss is turned into the ball in a twisted game of Monkey-in-The-Middle. She is forced to become an even more intense version of the folk hero she never wanted to be, and prodded by her enemy as the one person who can make it all stop. Jennifer Lawrence embodies this well, as she often struggles to find the right words or the right tone. Of course, when she finally does, she is exploited as a symbol of the rebellion…both for better and for worse.
What’s interesting in that respect is the way Lawrence is manipulated at the hands of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore. There’s a wonderful echo-effect in seeing two veteran actors mould the performance of an ingenue. They have a great understanding of how she will affect us, her audience, and know how to harness that for maximum effect. In a scary way, one wonders if similar conversations are had by studio heads about talents of Lawrence’s ilk.
Seeing all of these ideas interwoven into characters we have come to know and taken up by several we don’t is truly engaging. However, it builds up towards a brutal anticlimax that leaves us in the middle of nowhere. None of the loops the film has opened are closed off, and the resolution it does offer us feels merely like lip-service. In a word: this is a story without an end. Now it’s not the first time Hollywood has done this, and it probably won’t be the last…but this time it feels particularly pointed. Perhaps that’s because along with being a film with no end, it’s also a film with no beginning. It picks up sometime after the last film ended and leaves us sometime before the next film begins. The story structure is almost non-existent, probably because the source book was never written with a two-part structure in mind.
So what we end up with is several chapters from a book that has several more chapters to be told. Fans of this series and those who have followed it thus for will be pleased, but everyone else will walk away dissatisfied – and this trend of audience dissatisfaction really has to stop.
I both agree and disagree with your assessment. Yes, the trend of splitting the final book of a series into two parts has to stop. HARRY POTTER had a good reason for doing it, the rest were all cash-ins.
That said, I’ve seen worse in this regard. When I saw Mockingjay – Part 1 (having not read the books), I didn’t feel that the two hours were wasted and I also felt that a somewhat satisfying point was chosen to split the story.
The way I see it, the producers decided to split the book into two movies and that they should be treated like two movies, even if that results in lesser opinions.
A producers’ decision doesn’t supersede proper storytelling. If you want to treat this like its own movie, it fails: no beginning and no end cannot be permitted.
The only reason any of these have been split is money. Potter could have been one long movie, and would have been all the better for it.
I haven’t seen this yet, but it sounds like I was right in my complaints about this movie being split in two. Nothing happens in the first 1/2 of Mockingjay, and there really isn’t a satisfying point to split the film like there was in Deathly Hallows, IMO. I’ll still see it because I’m curious to see what changes were made, but I’m not expecting much.
It’s been a few days, so you might have caught up with it by now. What I liked about it (liked a lot, actually) was the way it zeroed in on the theme of propaganda throughout most of its runtime. Hell, even hearing the characters slough off the term “propo” as if it was no big deal was chilling.
I just wish they’d figured out a better way to close things out. We see some amazing things in the run-up to the film’s “cliffhanger”…and it feels like a little bit of a defter approach to storytelling could have made this a better installment.
I just saw this last night, and I have similar feelings. I actually enjoyed this film far more than I expected, just because I think they did a great time offering a lot more outside the first-person narrative that is the book. Of course I walked away dissatisfied because I knew it was a trendy cash grab to divide the final book into two film adaptations, forcing fans to wait yet ANOTHER year to see the finale unfold on-screen. But I thought this was possibly the most interesting of the three films thus far, and it held my attention better than the pages it was adapted from.
I’m hoping this is the end of this trend. I know Avengers is going to do it with Infinity War, but I hope that because they aren’t beholden to one book, that they’ll have a better approach to storytelling.
Something tells me I’m just going to have to start sitting these out until both parts are released.
The third book was by far the weakest. It lacked structure and focus and was little more a rather clunky set-up for what ultimately turned out to be a good ending. It was kind of worth it as the ending does give the trilogy a deeper/darker tone and more meaning than you expect. I won’t say any more on the subject to avoid giving anything away for those who haven’t read it.
With this in mind I was concerned that the this would be another example of Harry Potter Goes Hiking and Camping. It is actually better than that and has some good moments. I agree that it fails as a stand alone movie, but it was never intended to be. The number of people who go to see this who haven’t seen the first two are going to be negligible. They will have it on video and online in time for part two next year for those who missed it first time around so it will boost sales and rentals. The only real objective of the film and its measure of success will be how many people it convinces to go and see part II next year. It is a cynical commercial move, but no worse than turning The Hobbit into three movies.
Funny thing – it’s actually the inverse of “Harry Potter Goes Hiking and Camping”. It’s the long, winding set-up that’s the best part. This time the smackdown that serves as a stopping point is where it lacks oomph.
The funny thing about this – and Potter – in comparison to The Hobbit movies (which I’m no fan of btw), is that at the very least, Jackson has been able to adapt every section into something that works as a self-contained yarn. You’re right, I don’t expect people to suddenly show up for the third installment if they didn’t see the first two. However, that doesn’t mean they can’t pay attention to structure. Look at episodic television: Should episode six of Game of Thrones not have to be follow a plotted path just because it has four more episodes to finish its point?
I haven’t seen this one yet, and there’s no rush to do so. This half would be relevant when part 2 rolls out, though I don’t see the point of prolonging the finale. Everything exciting happens in the second half of the book, and the material itself is repetitive that there’s really no need to focus on the strategy and the planning and the small battles, when the bigger war is where everything important happens.
Agreed. I really feel like the best course of action is to wait until this drops on blu-ray next year. Watch it at suppertime one evening and go catch the late show of Part Two.
Just treat that space in between as an intermission of one long movie.
I really loved Mockingjay Pt. 1. For once – I actually agreed with the split into two movies. It bothered me to no end with the Hobbit (3 movies for a kids book, come on) but the novel is so difficult to handle because there is just too much. Half of it is emotionally/PTSD driven. Half is crazy action packed. With splitting it into two movies, it allowed for the audience to more appropriately discern those emotions, and I really liked that. Great review. 🙂