I will say this for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, it feels like they saved everything for Part 2. With a running time just over two hours, there’s maybe an hour’s worth of worthwhile content here as the story has been stretched to its absolute limit and beyond in an effort to justify breaking it into two parts. Oh well, such is the nature of today’s cinema. It’s just unfortunate it means scenes that would have otherwise been deleted five to ten years ago now remain in feature films, bringing them down with redundancies and melodrama best left on the cutting room floor.
Where Mockingjay – Part 1 wastes no time is getting us into the story. Either you’ve seen The Hunger Games and Catching Fire or you’ll be playing catch up the entire time as we find Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) still in a state of shock after the events that concluded the last installment. We learn District 12 has been destroyed and Katniss is now among the District 13 rebels, living underground and realizing her Hunger Games partner Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is now in the hands of the evil Capitol.
Searching for a symbol to lead their revolt against their oppressors, President Coin (Julianne Moore) and rebellion leader Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) attempt to convince Katniss to be their “mockingjay”, allowing her face to be the symbol of the rebellion, encouraging others to join the fight. For about half the film we get the “will she, or won’t she?” Katniss and for the next half we get the sometimes stoic, other times fragile Katniss, who’s both traumatized and energized by the atrocities before her as her nemesis, Panem President Snow (Donald Sutherland) begins using Peeta and white roses to mess with her head.
While some may try to tell you Mockingjay – Part 1 is filled with themes, it’s no different than what we’ve seen before when it comes to scrutiny of class and politics, and it’s done in such a way even a third grader would get it considering it boils down to “these guy are bad and these guys are good” and it’s not as if there is any grey area in-between. For all the thematic fronting the film does, it’s largely a “how to start a rebellion” movie, complete with several scenes best described as “How to, and how not to, make a propaganda video”, or “propos” as they call them and like to continually remind us of that fact.
Lawrence does her best to keep us engaged throughout the prolonged duration, a single tear falling from her eye more often than I can count, but there’s only so much she can do as each scene begins to feel either redundant or overly long to the point I wanted to scream at the screen during an extraction scene late in the movie, “We get it! Get on with it please!” However, once again, kudos to Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket as she is now out of her flamboyant Capitol duds and forced to make do with the District 13 rebels and their drab garb.
The stretching of the finale is something I came to terms with before walking into the theater so I can’t say it surprised me too much, but as someone that has read all three of Suzanne Collins‘ books that inspired the Hunger Games series, it was disappointing to see what I consider to be the best of the three turned into such a slog. Then again, as I alluded to in the opening paragraph, I fully expect Part 2 to knock our socks off as there is a lot left to take place, I just wonder if the filmmakers can be as blunt with the material as Collins was with her books, because so far they’ve proven they can’t be, needing to linger on scenes where they should just move along.
About halfway through this movie I couldn’t help but think back to The Matrix Reloaded. The production design of District 13’s miles-deep underground bunker reminding me of Zion as the rebels wait in hiding, hoping the Capitol won’t find them before they attack. But I also started to think about scenes in Reloaded, scenes such as the Zion dance rave and sex scene, the freeway chase sequence, the wonderful chatty back and forth with Lambert Wilson and other such sequences. Some of them worked, some didn’t, but they at least broke up the monotony, something Mockingjay fails to do.
Here it isn’t about introducing new situations or scenarios, it’s about revisiting the same ones time and again as Katniss needs to see the ravaged District 12 for herself, then she needs to visit District 8 and then she needs to visit District 12 again (though it does afford one character his very own Oskar Schindler moment), only to have each visit pretty much reinforce the same conclusion, things are shitty and the Capitol needs to go down. We also get the “We hate Peeta!” moment from the population of District 13, only to have them pretty much come to grips with what’s taking place before Gale (Liam Hemsworth) has to have his own “I hate Peeta!” moment. And all of this exists as we wait for Katniss to catch up with the rest of us. In this case to say it’s tedious would be a massive understatement.
All of that said, I get it, I get there is a lot of money to be made in turning what could have been a wonderful singular product into an inferior one split into two parts. You don’t argue with money, it’s how you appease stockholders. There are parts of a potentially good movie within Mockingjay – Part 1 and we’ll know just how good it could have been overall once Part 2 arrives next year.
