Movie review: The Hunger Games - the reluctant revolutionary

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I isn’t nearly as interesting as the previous two installments

There are times when the third installment of The Hunger Games — the awkwardly titled The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1, complete with colon and hyphen — looks more farce than a teenage dystopian thriller. The rebels who are fighting the tyrannical rule of the Capitol claim to be free and democratic, yet they live in a glorified dungeon wearing what resembles a prison uniform. Their symbol is a mockingjay but pets aren’t allowed. For all the grandstanding chief antagonist President Snow (Keifer Sutherland) is shown doing, the speeches of their own leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) are hardly much different. In fact, for all the fighting the protagonist Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has been doing in the past two movies, in Mockingjay her role is reduced to a literal caricature of herself; she is asked to shoot propaganda shorts in an effort to sustain the rebellion. Coin and her strategist, Plutarch (Phillip Seymour Hoffman brought to life) spend pretty much the first half of the movie churning out those videos or ‘propos’ as Plutarch affectionately calls them.

This is indicative of the more political turn Mockingjay has taken, away from the main prospect of watching another 90 minutes of children slaughtering each other Gladiator-style like the earlier movies. To explain this turn, some context is necessary. The films, based on the eponymous books, are set in a future dystopian country called PanEm, a fractured federation of 12 districts held tenuously by the tyrannical President Snow. The Hunger Games were designed to be a gimmicky Olympics-style battle to promote intra-district rivalry thereby sustaining the Capitol’s rule. Katniss and her partner, the perennial don-in-distress Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), won the games in the first movie, unsuspectingly kicking off a rebellion, and were surviving another round in the second until Katniss literally blew up the whole thing. When the third film begins, Katniss has been whisked away by a rebel organisation aiming to overthrow President Snow and Peeta, much to Katniss’s dismay (and to nobody’s surprise), needs rescuing.

This gender role reversal is at the heart of what makes The Hunger Games series so compelling. In arbitrary acts of affection (or charity, if you’re cynical) Katniss courts both Peeta and Gale (Chris Hemsworth), a friend from her district, neither of whom seem to occupy her thoughts or feelings for long. In Mockingjay, Gale finally says what everyone’s thinking (except, perhaps Katniss) and tells Katniss after another one of those kisses that she only gives them when she sees him in pain. The admission also underlines another fact about Katniss: she giveth and she taketh away as she wishes. It’s this subtle, but powerful defiance of patriarchal order that Plutarch wants to capture in his ‘propos’. Whatever the merits of propaganda videos, Katniss is at her very best when she’s out and about shooting down multiple aircraft with a single shot or when she’s out hunting. The latter half of the film is taken up by a rescue operation that Katniss isn’t part of and like the audience she too must settle for watching other people on a screen. It leads to a flaccid ending, already ill-timed because of the corporate need to split a single book into two movies.

The previous Hunger Games movies ticked all the boxes of a Hollywood blockbuster — action, sequels and star actors — but crucially, it also added subversive, even genre-defining feminism for good measure. By design it seems, ‘Mockingjay’ does not do the same.



Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, December 14^th, 2014.