Film Review | The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I

We’re all beholden to crazes and aggressive franchises – in music, television, film and even books. In short, it’s all of pop culture and it’s all up in our faces now: anyone try to escape from Kim Kardashian’s bottom a couple of weeks ago?

It’s no accident that its power to ‘break the internet’ was announced ahead of the event – our meme-gobbling nature has become so predictable that advertisers and their affiliates in crime aren’t even ashamed to confess they’re one step ahead of us.

So the party poopers among us stack up our defences: they’ll call us snobs and party poopers, but what’s the alterantive. A knee-jerk suspicion of anything remotely ‘popular’ or ‘mainstream’ arises, which in turn gives your detractors permission to label you a ‘hipster’: the modern equivalent of being outed as a leper in the community.

One of the phenomena that has persisted with Darwinian powers of endurance in recent years was the ‘young adult’ tale. As a specific marketing term for popular literature, ‘YA’ is a curiously 21st century creation, though of course books aimed at teenagers have arguably been in circulation ever since… well, ever since books started to be circulated.

We could debate the sub-genre’s true origins until our respective youths are well and truly spent, but let’s target JK Rowling’s bestselling boy wizard romps as our starting point just now.

In both book and film form, Harry Potter galvanised the idea of reading as a collective communal activity that can be as much of an ‘event’ as the next Star Wars or Marvel Studios film… not to mention the fact that the young adult market proved to be an eminently profitable one. So along rolls up Stephenie Meyer’s Mormon-vampire saga, Twilight… the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s natural that you would want to milk your cash cow for as long as you can. The regrettable by-product of this – as was evidenced by both the Potter and Twilight franchises – is the tendency to bifurcate the final books in question into two instalments, so that ‘Book Three’ (or, as it happens, six or seven), becomes ‘Film 3.1’ and ‘Film 3.2’. It’s a blatant attempt at taking twice our money, shamelessly flouting the three-act structure (Aristotle has probably burrowed his way into an underwater afterlife with all the rolling in the grave he must have been doing).

But it would be a shame to dismiss The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part I as yet another example of the regrettable sign of the cinematic times we’re all going through. Once again under the helm of director Francis Lawrence (no relation to our star), this new chapter of the Suzanne Collins kids-vs-totalitarian-regime saga uses its newly won leisurely pace to craft genuine suspense and to pace its emotional beats with maximum, strategic aplomb.

Having been rescured from the gladiatorial Hunger Games in the previous instalment, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) finds herself at the centre of a well-oiled revolutionary group led by President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) and Katniss’s former mentor Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – whose former affiliation to the villainous President Snow (Donald Sutherland) is now revealed to have been an act.

Plutarch wants to wean Katniss to be the face of the revolution, by sending out propaganda videos to the beleaguered Districts that have suffered the wrath of the President Snow-captained Capitol, in retaliation for Katniss’s public rebellion against the hunger games.

Katniss, however, is conflicted about the new role she is made to play – especially given that her beloved Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is still left in thrall of the Capitol… and propaganda unleashed from their end suggests that he has been brainwashed to compromise the rebellion’s plans of action.

The previous Hunger Games instalments made satirical nods to reality television, but here that satire is extended to more troubling – and current – real-world referents, all the while weaving it into the thrilling central story.

Where last year’s Catching Fire was an overstuffed re-tread of the series’ opening salvo, the powers that be have ensured that this remains a gripping film first, overzealous piece of fan-service second.

Just as the story moves away from the epileptic media circus of the Capitol-sponsored ‘Hunger Games’ and into the more Spartan world of the underground resistance, so does the film tighten its narrative reins and focus its dramatic pressure points.

Though a comparatively slow start may put some off, it provides a necessary lead-in into this new – and quite literally subterranean – world, giving Katniss enough time to recover from her initial shock and for us to realise what’s fully at stake.

What then follows is a canny dissection of how propaganda can work to the advantage of the ‘good guys’. Gone is the hunger games’ too-easy embedded critique of reality contest television like ‘Survivor’, to make way for a behind-the-scenes peek at how incendiary propaganda films are made – an unsettling proposition, given that rise of ISIS is happening as we speak. The simple desire to grapple with such things already lends a tone of sneaky cleverness to the proceedings.

That’s not to say that the film is a pretentious attempt at shoehorning intelligent discourse into blockbuster material – see: Christopher Nolan at his worst – or that the pace is smothered by thematic preoccupations.

Having a guerrilla resistance as your heroes often means one thing above all, in movies: you get at least one rousing call to action that’s bound to give you goosebumps if played right. Well, here, courtesy of ever-resourceful Katniss, you get two. Along with a climactic covert mission worthy of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.

Thoroughly satisfying entertainment.