It’s a huge cop-out that Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is both tied into a love triangle and actually takes a husband from it, but it’s nice that the movies de-emphasize the drama and keep Gail’s (Liam Hemsworth) whining to a minimum. Photos courtesy Lionsgate.
Just when I start singing their praises…
Part one of Mockingjay, the third installment of the Hunger Games series, is a major disappointment, primarily because it is abundantly clear how much the adaptation is stretched in order to split the release into two parts because that’s what Harry Potter did.
The movie follows Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as she adjusts to life in the once-secret District 13, a fascist military district dedicated to overthrowing the totalitarian Capital. Everdeen struggles to make the adjustment, partially because she is being used as the main subject of the district’s propaganda films to incite further riots in the other districts, a series of uprisings which started after she broke the Hunger Games in Catching Fire. She is also worried for Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who is forced into similar propaganda by the reigning government as part of a psychological war President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) wages on Everdeen personally.
The film ends a little less than halfway through the plot of the book going by page number, but about a fifth of the way through going by plot points. The first two movies did an excellent job of only filming what was filmable and not trying to allot every individual chapter the same amount of attention. Mockingjay makes a major misstep here.
Reel Entropy 