Mockingjay Part 2
by Peter Craig, Danny Strong, Suzanne Collins
I was introduced to The Hunger Games when Mark Oshiro did his read of them… but I didn’t actually read the books until he had just finished the last chapter of the last book, and I accidently read his post and it was so beautiful that I got The Hunger Games on my (then brand new) Kindle, and it was the first time that I got to experience to delight of finishing a book at 1 am, and IMMEDIATELY BUYING THE NEXT ONE from the comfort of my own bed without putting on pants.
This is a wonderful modern age sometimes.
I’ve seen all the movies, and while Mockingjay isn’t my favorite book, there are moments in it I really like, and the last line always makes me a little choked up. So of course I went to see Mockingjay Part 2 as soon as it opened.
It left me a bit cold, to be honest. There was no need for Mockingjay to be split into two movies, save the money grab. I’ll talk about book-to-movie adaptations later, but yeah, no, this wasn’t necessary. I mean, yes, we got to say goodbye to Philip Seymour Hoffman for two movies instead of one, but that’s a mixed blessing.
Mockingjay Part 2 picks up where Part 1 left off- Peeta has been rescued from captivity and torture in the Capitol, but thanks to said torture, he thinks Katniss is evil and out to kill everyone, and as he fights his way back to sanity, Katniss continues with her obsession to kill President Snow and get revenge for the horrors he’s visited on her family, her district, the nation of Panem, and her. Mostly in that order. There’s a battle in another district, and then the invasion of the Capitol, and then four movies worth of falling action which somehow manages to go on way too long and skims over a lot.
(I also spent a good chunk of time wishing I had a Super Soaker to spray people in the back of the head because they were using their phones the ENTIRE MOVIE and I didn’t want to miss any part of the movie to go tell the staff, but I should have. The flaw with the super soaker plan is concerns about aim, and I don’t want to accidently hit innocent people who turned their fucking phones off.)
(I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT APPROPRIATE MOVIE THEATER BEHAVIOR.)
Anyway.
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen is of course fantastic. She’s a great actress. She can do repressed fury and PTSD blue screening like a champ, and we know this. Thankfully, Josh Hutcherson (Peeta) has grown as an actor since the first movie and has gotten a LOT better. Liam “Can I play the guy who can beat up Thor?” Hemsworth is fine as Gale, but I don’t really give a fuck about Gale as a character in general and never have.
They got everyone for the supporting roles- Michelle Forbes, Julianne Moore, the previously mentioned Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Jena Malone, Donald Sutherland, and a criminally underused Gwendoline Christie.
The visuals are slick and glossy (kind of like the Capitol, so…sure) and there’s a LOT of action sequences without much breathing space between them. The final series of climaxes just goes on and on and on, and then we have a solid twenty minutes of falling action before the end of the movie. Like, Return of the King had the Battle of the Five Endings, which I was fine with, because that was falling action for a 9-12 hour movie (depending on the combination of theatrical and extended releases you were going with), and this is falling action for a 8 hour movie, I GUESS, but it didn’t need to be.
Also the girls sitting behind me had clearly not read the books, and one of them said “I have no idea what happened in the last twenty minutes” and part of that is because she was texting. I wished I’d snagged them and asked more what they thought, because I’m honestly not sure if I knew what was going on only because I already knew from the books. I hope there’s someone who can answer that.
I’m not totally sure how I would have cut the book down, but it could have been done, and it would have been okay. No, not everyone from the book would have made it on screen. That’s okay! They are two different mediums, and there are things you can do in a book that don’t work on screen, and vice versa, so…trying to appease people who will be mad that “they cut that thing that I love!” will always end in tears (granted, the counterfactual of this is the movie of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, which was basically “Scenes from the Goblet of Fire” and had no through line and just dropped in “oh, priori incantatum” and didn’t explain what that meant, so…) (still bitter).
My point is, being ruthless in your cuts and changes is okay, as long as you have a reason for everything you’re cutting and everything you’re leaving in — and everything you add. If your reason is “….cuz?” That’s not ok.
However, if your reason is, “We needed a better narrative through-line, and we consolidated these three characters because we didn’t have the luxury of 40 pages to explain the whys and wherefores of each dude,” then I’m good. I want directors to have put thought into it.
This is not to say that I don’t think that Francis Lawrence just decided to not cut anything (he did) but I’m 99.9999999% certain that the directive to split the book into two parts came from the studio (who wanted and will get 4 movies of profit from this franchise). So he had 4 and a half hours of movie to fill, and he didn’t have to make many drastic cuts. I just really think he should have had to.
As the end of a ground-breaking franchise (Look, a franchise centered around a female character has made all the money!) this was perfectly fine. As a standalone movie…well, it’s not one. You cannot see this movie (it’s a part 2, for crying out loud) without having seen the other movies in the series.
I still prefer the first book and the first movie, but as a whole, I’m mostly content with how this franchise ended.
Mockingjay is in theatres now and you can find tickets (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.
I watched it with my daughter, who hadn’t read the final book yet (she has read the first one) but had watched the movies. Afterward, she asked me why Katniss shot… the person she shot (spoilers, yeah) and I had to explain it to her. I’m unsure whether that was because the politics were above a 12-year-old’s head or because the film made it that confusing (having the exposition come from someone suspect makes it difficult to buy in).
I will never, EVER understand the reasoning behind spending any kind of money on a ticket to see something and then spending the entire time on your cell to the detriment of everyone else. I spent almost $200 apiece for tickets to a Vegas show and the person in the aisle in front of me spent the first five minutes of said show on her cell until someone beside me reached over her shoulder, grabbed it and sent it down the aisle. There was a minor but tasteful explosion of applause and one of the ushers picked it up by the stage. There were no other cell phones for the rest of the show.
I saw it Friday night with my husband, son and about 10,000 kids in the cinema. We were lucky because they were all extraordinarily well-behaved (although my son complained that the person sitting behind him let out pizza burps through the whole movie).
I found it a bit slow, but quite enjoyable. Yeah, I could have done without the multiple endings, but, mostly, I was relieved that, after four years of keeping my mouth shut (I’m the only one who read the books), I could talk about certain things at last. Even if my husband and son both insisted they could see those things coming.
I was upset that they completely cut out the fact that Katniss was suffering from PTSD and the fact that she was injured from being shot and had to work through training with Johanna in order to even get to the capital. And don’t get me started on how they wasted the opportunity to showcase the awesomeness that is Jena Malone.
I don’t understand how people cant think of their fellow movie goers when they go to a movie. Going to the movies is a rarity for me. I actually haven’t gone since Deathly Hollows part II. I remember being shocked when I saw a women checking her Facebook. I have a feeling I would be so pissed at peoples cell phone behavior now
I haven’t yet watched this last movie but, having not read the books, the first one didn’t do anything for me. All around me, people were crying and I didn’t understand why I should care. What was up with the fingers in the air? Why do I care about Rue? She was in the movie for merely a couple of scenes? I cried more at the trailer (which was brilliant) than the actual movie. And I had to get the scoop about the world from friends who had read the books.
The second and third movies, I enjoyed and could follow without having read the books.
From the sounds of your review, I’m thinking I might be lost yet again during this last movie. I’ll ask friends for a recap of the book before seeing it.
Excellent review: your comments are spot on. Since they made the money-grabbing decision to split book 3 into 2 movies one would have thought they would do a better job of it. Jennifer Lawrence was terrific, as were all the supporting actors though many were sadly underused. My husband and I went on the weekend and he, not having read any of the books, followed the story fine but commented that dragging it out over 4 movies seemed unnecessary and is glad we’ve finally got to the end. I’ve read the books (though by book 3 I was tending to skim read) and, like you I think book 1 and movie 1 are the best but am mostly satisfied with how the franchise ended.
I read the books and appreciated them, and I’m glad the movies have made money because female hero! But … the story was a major downer. The whole dystopia thing is not my bag, and it’s so violent. Never wanted to see the movies, having it in my head from the books was bad enough.
There was a whole row of cackling hyenas – I mean teenage girls – behind me when I saw it, who giggled loudly through the entire thing. People dying horribly? Giggle giggle giggle. Peeta trying to kill Katniss? Giggle. Gale’s rather sad departure. Giggle, giggle, giggle. Argh. I’m just saying that everyone had better be super well behaved on the first showing of Star Wars. Or else.
It definitely didn’t need to be four movies. I think the obsession with trying to please book fans first and foremost really harms a lot of adaptations. Pull the quarter quell back to the climax of act 2 of the second movie, set up district 13 and Katniss as brand mockingjay in the third act, ending on a dark Peeta is being tortured note, and have his rescue and the final push in the third film.
One thing that really hurt it for me was the determination to get a lower film certificate. You can’t hide that these are incredibly violent deaths just by not adding any blood to them. The scene where the guy has very clearly had his legs blown off but everyone is very awkward stood around him in such a way the camera doesn’t show that is painfully awkward, and really draws attention to the problem. It makes action sequences hard to follow, and most of the kids who qualify to see the movie as part of the edits are old enough to know what’s going on even without the blood, so will still find it disturbing.
The people who text/phone/talk in theaters are going to the special hell…
Great review. I saw it yesterday, and I think I enjoyed it more than most people did. It was a satisfying conclusion for me, although I did think the very end of the movie was curiously lame (or maybe it’s just that finishing a movie series can never be as satisfying as finishing a book series).
But I really wanted to comment because HG was the first book I ever read on my shiny new-at-the-time kindle and the first time I, too, experienced the magic of “finishing a book at 1 am, and IMMEDIATELY BUYING THE NEXT ONE!” Setting me up for many, many sleepless nights and a heck of a lot more book buying than I ever did when in the good old days of paperbacks. So this series has a special nostalgia for me and basically nothing connected to it can do wrong in my eyes!
Mockingjay the book was my first experience of instant e-book gratification and I loved the elegiac tone of the entire novel. It’s my favorite of the three books. The films—well, the first one had too much video-game style action for my taste and too little character development. Conversely the next two I adored. I haven’t seen this one yet but I will watch it. Note how I didn’t say i was excited to watch it…it’s the most violent and depressing segment of the series so it’s not destined to be my favorite ultimately. Still, I adore the strong female central character and I admire the way the films were made without oversexualizing the Katniss character.
In fact (file under Things That Piss Me Off) I read an article online about how the movies sanitized Katniss, took the sexuality and passion from her character. I perceive that as a misogynistic read of the films. The person who wrote the article seemed to want to reduce a complex character’s coming of age to a love-interest role…as if Katniss Everdeen were just too much woman to deal with if she had an aspect or five that had nothing to do with whom she wished to bang. Grrr.
I watched it today. It was decent but not “dang, that was a good movie” good. The part with the pods had me grumbling to myself about secondary IEDs and idiots from the start. Clearly this is a manifestation of a Soldier Problem With Movie Combat Scenes.
There’s so many stories about bad behavior in movie theaters. Kind of makes me glad that the nearest one to us is almost 40 miles away and that I don’t drive. That unfortunately means that I’ll have to wait until this comes out on DVD to see it. :/
Love all of the movies and the books. I finally got around to reading the series this past summer because I just needed an escape. We have nice patch of woods with a creek on our property. Every morning, I would read the HG novels to the sounds of birds and nature. It really helped me get immersed in the story, especially the first two books.