by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I finally
got to see the last episode in the film cycle based on Suzanne Collins’ The
Hunger Games, given the ungainly title The
Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 (following
that damnable practice started by the makers of the Harry Potter movies of spinning one more blockbuster movie out of
a book cycle by splitting the last book into two films) and closing out the
story told in Collins’ remarkable series of books featuring Katniss Everdeen,
girl archer and hunter who triumphs in a neo-gladiatorial contest set in a
future country called “Panem” (as in the Latin word for “bread” — Collins gives
almost all the characters in the Capital, where Panem’s 1-percenters live,
names of historical Romans to underscore the parallel between her dystopian future
and the Roman Empire) that’s located in what’s now the northeastern U.S. and
emerged after the U.S. itself collapsed during a series of atomic wars. It also
became a dictatorship and established the Hunger Games, an annual ritual in
which two conscripts from each of the 12 Districts where production actually
takes place were put into an arena and forced to fight to the death, with the
last survivor being declared the winner. Enough modern technology survived that
the Hunger Games were beamed onto TV receivers all over Panem and the
population was forced to watch
whether they wanted to or not. The first book in the cycle depicted Katniss
(Jennifer Lawrence) and her friend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson, who had to
have his hair dyed blond for the role — something he hated — and in the final
scene of Mockingjay, Part 2,
filmed well after the rest of the movie, he wore a blond wig because he didn’t
want to have his hair bleached again to match the rest of the film), who
becomes one of her lovers during the course of the story, triumphing in the
Hunger Games after all the other contestants die and Peeta declares that since
they are lovers, they won’t kill each other. This act of defiance against the
all-powerful Capital authorities sparks a Panem-wide revolution which, in the
next two books, Catching Fire and
Mockingjay, fights its way to the
Capital itself and directly threatens the regime of Panem’s president,
Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland). Snow appears to be an all-powerful
dictator but by the end of Mockingjay he’s revealed to be a rather befuddled guy, sort of like Louis XVI,
who inherited (he didn’t build) the ancien regime and finds himself unable to understand why anyone
would challenge it or how to meet the challenge.
During the rebellion Peeta
gets captured by the forces of the Capital and is subjected to venom from a
trackerjacker (one of many genetically engineered beasts the Capital’s
scientists have created both to make the Hunger Games more interesting and
lethal and to suppress any attempt by the District populations to rebel) and
other treatments that brainwash him and lead him to believe Katniss is actually
evil and is trying to kill him. The revolutionaries recapture Peeta but his
mood-swings — sometimes he’s close to his normal self (though considerably more
morose than he was in the earlier films) and sometimes he snaps back to being
mind-controlled by the Capital and threatening to betray them — and most of Mockingjay,
Part 2 is a pretty standard war movie in
which a commando team attempts to infiltrate the enemy’s capital and avoid the
booby traps the enemy has strewn about. The traps are called “pods” and each
one unleashes a life-threatening defense mechanism, whether bio-engineered
creatures (so-called “mutts,” which in this version are white-skinned hairless
humanoids something like the Orcs in the film version of The Lord of
the Rings, though while reading the books
I’d imagined them, based on their name, as more like monstrous feral dogs than
people), a huge pool of oil, automatically fired machine guns or whatever. I
remember that Charles and I discovered The Hunger Games almost by accident — I’d seen a copy of the first
book in the cycle either just before or just after the first movie came out in
2012 and picked it up, wanting to know just what the fuss was about — and I was
blown away by it, particularly by Suzanne Collins’ beautiful combination of
social comment and action-adventure, and I passed it on to Charles immediately
after I finished it and promptly ordered online the other two books in the
sequence, Catching Fire and Mockingjay. I remember reading the last pages of Mockingjay in a tearing rush as I was heading home on a bus
from a meeting and being absolutely riveted to the pages even as I was also
grandly disappointed by the ending; Collins had done such a good job of
portraying a revolutionary movement just as soulless and unscrupulous as the
Capital elite it was trying to displace that the message seemed to be that
society as it is sucks, but any attempt to change it is going to create
something that may suck a lot more and at the very best will suck only a little
less (as Katniss’s sardonic narration at the end of the book Mockingjay says), and the only real way to challenge the system is to drop out of it as
much as possible, as Katniss and Peeta have done at the end of the story when
they literally cultivate their garden (a nice touch omitted from the film, in
which the bucolic denouement
happens in a wood but Katniss and Peeta aren’t doing anything but looking after
their two sons, played by Jennifer Lawrence’s real-life nephews) and withdraw
from the rest of the world as much as possible.
I had read the open anarchism
of Mockingjay’s ending — the
message that salvation from a screwed-up political, social and economic system
lies not in collective action to
change it, but in individual
action to live as far apart from it as possible — as a kind of consensus
statement of the philosophy of American youth these days, particularly since
the huge success of the cycle, especially among the “young adult” readers (and
moviegoers) for whom it was intended, seemed to suggest it was speaking to
something powerful in the Zeitgeist
of its young audience. Oh sure, there seem to be occasional twitchings of
political and social activism among America’s young — the Occupy movement of
2011 (also the year the first Hunger Games novel was published, and to me it seemed almost a fictional parable of
the ideas behind Occupy — though others, like ardent Libertarian Will Stoddard
of the annual Condor science-fiction conventions in San Diego, read it as a
parable of the evils of big government) and the support Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy has won among
young voters this year — but one of my fears for the future of this country is
that, once Bernie Sanders is not
the Democratic Presidential nominee, all too many of his young supporters will
conclude that they were right the first time, that political activism is a
waste and they’ll go back to individualistic lives the way the Hunger
Games’ protagonists do, not because they
don’t want to see a better world but they don’t see any realistic way one can
be achieved. Anyway, I was a bit surprised by the overall tone of this movie —
granted, Suzanne Collins’ cycle starts out surprisingly optimistic (by allying
and declaring their love, real or feigned, on TV before all Panem Katniss and
Peeta wittingly or unwittingly strike a blow against the Capital establishment
and win at least a temporary victory at the end of book one) and gets
considerably darker, especially once we run into the District 13 hierarchy at
the start of Mockingjay, where we
soon learn that the so-called revolutionaries who want to take over from the
Capital elite have set up a society just as regimented and unfree as the
Capital’s regime they want to displace. (When I read the book I thought of the
Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” — with its final, chilling line, “Meet the new
boss/Same as the old boss” — and thought it would have made a much better outro
theme over the closing credits than the rather wimpy lullaby Jennifer Lawrence
sings to her kids in the final scene.)
I remember the book as one great energy
rush from start to finish; the film, on the other hand, seems slow, somber,
almost ponderous — and not because its director, Francis Lawrence, isn’t good
enough to keep it moving but because he seems to want a draggy pace to emphasize what’s happening not only
to the stories but the characters in them. (Oddly, though Veronica Roth’s Divergent cycle is hardly at the level of The Hunger
Games — not only is she nowhere near as
good a writer as Suzanne Collins, her story is considerably more muddled in its
political and social implications — the directors who’ve made the Divergent movies, Neil Burger and Robert Schwentke, seem
stronger filmmakers than Gary Ross, who directed the first Hunger
Games movie, or Francis Lawrence, who made
the rest of the cycle.) With Mockingjay, Part 2 I missed, more than I had before, Katniss’s own
sardonic voice narrating the story and wished the filmmakers had at least
considered a film noir-style
voiceover narration by which we would have seen and heard the events as filtered through her
consciousness. I also noticed that the story does rely an awful lot on old-fashioned movie clichés —
the moment we realize we’re watching former Hunger Games survivor Finnick Odair
(Sam Claflin) getting married to his girlfriend, we just know he’s not going to be among the living at the final
fadeout, and indeed he isn’t; also, though I know the filmmakers were stuck
with it because it was a key part of Collins’ original novels, the romantic
triangle between Katniss, Peeta and her previous hunter-gatherer boyfriend Gale
Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth, who frankly did considerably more for me
aesthetically than Josh Hutcherson did, just as Taylor Lautner seemed hotter to
both Charles and I than Robert Pattinson in the Twilight cycle) was pretty useless (though I have a good
friend who was vehemently upset with the way the cycle ended because she
thought Katniss should have gone with Gale instead of Peeta — whereas I’d seen
the ending Collins wrote as at least in part a symbol of human progress:
Katniss begins the cycle as a hunter-gatherer but at the end she accepts not
only Peeta but the next step in the evolution of human culture: agriculture).
Overall, though, Mockingjay, Part 2
was a quite good conclusion to the cycle, despite its longueurs; Lawrence and his writers (Suzanne Collins is
credited with “adaptation” of her novel but two other authors, Peter Craig and
Danny Strong, wrote the actual script) mostly manage to capture the original
spirit of the piece and in particular its bitter ending [spoiler
alert]: President Snow orders his palace
gates to be open for a refuge for the Capital’s children, but then a bomb
attack wipes out virtually everyone who takes Snow up on his offer — including
Katniss’s sister Prim (Willow Shields), who you’ll recall was why Katniss
signed up for the Hunger Games in the first place: Prim (short for “Primrose”)
had been drafted and Katniss used her legal right to save her sister’s life by
taking her place in the arena. Katniss confronts Snow, but Snow proves to her
that it was the rebels, not the Capital’s own army of so-called “Peacekeepers,”
that launched the attack that killed Katniss’s sister. So when she’s given the
opportunity to assassinate Snow in a ceremonial execution being televised all
across Panem to announce the new regime of President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore)
— who set up the equally dictatorial regime in District 13 and is quickly moving
to establish her own dictatorship to replace Snow’s (if Snow is the Louis XVI
of The Hunger Games, Coin is its
Robespierre) — Katniss draws her arrow but uses it to kill Coin instead. She’s
arrested but the new leader, Commander Paylor (Patina Miller), pardons her and
allows her to return to her home in District 12 with Peeta and they both drop
out of public life, presumably for the rest of their lives. I find myself with
a certain sadness leaving the world of The Hunger Games after having spent four years first with Collins’
books and then with the various movies as they came out, and Charles made the
comment that watching the last of the Hunger Games films only reminded us of how much stronger this
sequence was than the Divergent
cycle (a trailer for the third film in the Divergent series, Allegiant: Part 1 — they did it again! — preceded Mockingjay,
Part 2 on the disc), both as
political/social commentary and as sheer storytelling!
