The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 splits Suzanne Collins’s 2010 novel in two, and the seam shows

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 splits Suzanne Collins’s 2010 novel in two, and the seam shows. Directed by Francis Lawrence from a screenplay by Peter Craig and Danny Strong, the 2014 film runs 123 minutes and spends most of them underground in District 13, where Katniss Everdeen trades the arena for a propaganda war. It premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on November 10, 2014, and Lionsgate released it in the United States on November 21. The tagline promises that “Fire burns brighter in the darkness.” The film mostly sits in the dark.

Trailer, via The Hunger Games.

District 13 and the Mockingjay Deal

After Katniss destroys the arena forcefield in the 75th Hunger Games, she, Beetee and Finnick Odair are pulled from the wreckage and taken to District 13, an underground stronghold cut off from the rest of Panem and running the rebellion. President Alma Coin, played by Julianne Moore, has a request. Katniss’s arrow set off riots in more than half the districts, and Snow bombed District 12 in answer. Coin wants a symbol, and she wants Katniss to be it.

Jennifer Lawrence carries that bargain better than the script does. Katniss walks the ruins of District 12, finds her old house untouched with white roses from President Snow inside, and only agrees to the Mockingjay role after watching Peeta Mellark manipulated on state television to calm the rebellion. The film gives its star grief, rage and a film crew, and not much else to do with them.

A Hospital in District 8

The middle stretch turns Katniss into a production. Effie Trinket returns as her stylist, Gale Hawthorne signs on as bodyguard, and the unit travels to District 8, where Katniss is filmed being saluted by dozens of wounded civilians at a hospital. Snow sees the footage and orders an airstrike that kills everyone inside. The crew then films Katniss and Gale shooting down two Capitol hovercraft, and her threatening speech pushes loggers in District 7 to revolt.

The strongest sequence follows Katniss to District 12 to film her singing “The Hanging Tree.” Rebels in District 5 pick up the same anthem and hit a hydroelectric dam, the Capitol’s main power source. The dam implodes and the Capitol goes dark.

The cast is deep and largely underused:

• Julianne Moore as President Alma Coin
• Philip Seymour Hoffman as Plutarch Heavensbee
• Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy
• Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman
• Donald Sutherland as President Coriolanus Snow

Hoffman’s Plutarch is the film’s most interesting operator, and the film never lets him finish the thought.

What the Two-Part Split Costs

Mockingjay – Part 1 is a setup act stretched to feature length. Development began in May 2012, when Lionsgate announced Collins’s novel would become two films, and Francis Lawrence signed on that November to shoot both back-to-back. Principal photography ran from September 2013 to June 2014 across Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin. The production faced controversy when its content surfaced in political protests in 2014 and 2015.

None of that ambition is the problem. The problem is that the story stops at the threshold of full-scale war and calls it an ending. Katniss watches Peeta interviewed by Caesar Flickerman, and the credits arrive before anything resolves. The film withholds the payoff and asks to be judged on the withholding.

Why the Withholding Fails

This is the weakest of the four Hunger Games films, and it is not close. The performances hold — Lawrence, Moore and Hoffman give the material a weight the pacing does not earn — and the dam sequence is the best action the series staged. But a two-part split needs a first half with its own shape, and this one has a premise, a montage and a promise. The propaganda-battle idea is genuinely sharp: a rebellion run like a media campaign, with Katniss as the product. The film just keeps explaining the product instead of selling it.

Worth watching once, as the runway for the finale rather than a film on its own terms.

Francis Lawrence · Hunger Games · Jennifer Lawrence · Lionsgate · Mockingjay Part 1 · movie review