PLAY TIME IS OVER: THIS KATNISS IS A KILLER
This time a year ago, I could feel myself falling out of love with
The Hunger Games. The first film in what will eventually be a four-picture series had been an unexpected and unqualified triumph, but the second, Catching Fire, struggled to live up to its title. Jennifer Lawrence was still terrifically watchable as our bow-toting heroine, Katniss Everdeen, but as her arrow pierced the roof of the Hunger Games arena, bringing the Quarter Quell games to a destructively premature close, you could almost feel the energy trickling out of the franchise as well.
So one of the real surprises of this late autumn has been to find the series, adapted from Suzanne Collins’s hugely popular trilogy of novels, roaring back to top form. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay,
Part One is very good indeed and all the better for featuring no Hunger Games at all. The days of teenager killing teenager for the entertainment of the Capitol are over: life in Panem is now a lot more serious than that.
And that, in a nutshell, is the strength of the film. It is once again directed by Francis Lawrence but it is certainly the darkest – in terms of both mood and cinematography – in the series to date. Named after Katniss’s broach, which has become a symbol of hope and rebellion, Mockingjay is about uprisings, revolution and modern warfare, where the propaganda battle is often more important than the fighting on the ground.
That’s something that both sides – President Snow and the Capitol on one side, the growing rebellion from the districts on the other – are both acutely aware of as the action resumes, pretty much where Catching
Fire left off. Recovering in the underground caverns of District 13 and still traumatised by her escape, Katniss appears in no fit state to get involved with the growing rebellion. But the uprising needs a figurehead and Plutarch Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has gone from games organiser to head of propaganda for the rebellion in the course of a train ride, is confident Katniss is the right person. Less convinced is District 13’s steel-haired President Coin (Julianne Moore). ‘That’s not the girl you described – the games have destroyed her.’
The rebels, however, need someone, and quickly, because President Snow (Donald Sutherland) has Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) – one of the two young men in Katniss’s life – and is clearly determined to use him as a propaganda tool, coercing him into denouncing both Katniss and the rebels. And with that, I think we can safely say battle lines have been drawn.
Along with the darker mood, the obvious parallels with the real world mean
Mockingjay is likely to go down better with an older audience than the first two films. Suicide missions, propaganda videos and the use of a prisoner to denounce his own side all provide chilling echoes of the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, although it’s sobering to realise that in Mockingjay some of these tactics are being used by the good guys rather than the bad.
But parents do also need to know that one or two shocking scenes, involving summary executions and a large pile of burned bodies, make a real mockery of the film’s 12A certificate. A 15A certificate would surely have been more appropriate.
Nevertheless, this is a powerfully well-paced and sharply edited picture which, after a slow, moody and distinctly downbeat opening, delivers big
moment after big moment. Katniss’s visit to the burning ruins of her home, District 12; the visit to the over-crowded field hospital in District 8; the lumberjacks of District 7 leading the so-called Peacekeepers to their doom… For a more mature audience, this is all far more powerful than the initial – and always, frankly, unpleasant – fantasy of teenagers killing each other. Not surprisingly, given the more adult mood, it’s the older actors who shine this time. Hoffman is quietly
‘Given the more adult mood, it’s the older actors who shine this time… and Lawrence matches them’ terrific, Moore brings authority and presence to President Coin, and 79-year-old Sutherland gets better and better as Snow gets nastier and nastier.
But Lawrence has always been an actress older than her years and she more than matches her senior colleagues, bringing a vulnerability and emotional turbulence to Katniss that we haven’t seen before, as well as the charisma and feistiness we have.
Hutcherson and Katniss’s other young man, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), however, still fail to totally convince and the chemistry of this particularly misbegotten love triangle remains lukewarm. By contrast, both Sam Claflin, playing another rebel, Finnick, and Elizabeth Banks, as designer Effie Trinket, grab what chances they have, the latter contributing most of the little humour.
‘You know what’s getting in the way of your revolution?’ comments Effie as she gives Katniss a quick pre-rebellion makeover. ‘That hair.’ With Part One so successfully delivered, the only real question is whether Mockingjay, Part Two can possibly live up to it. We’ll find out in a year’s time.