Poor Katniss Everdeen, your heart is pure but your fate isn't yours to decide, and while the working-class revolution explodes and the "we burn, you burn" rally echoes, you look on and wonder if you're a piece or a player, a pawn or a plotter.
The first Hunger Games is a fable of class repression and a cry against totalitarianism, all cloaked in the exhilarating media satire and Jennifer Lawrence's gamine courage. In that film, she's a player. The second movie, Catching Fire, vamps up the fantasy-adventure routine as Katniss enters the champions' game of games and a horde of computerised baboons try to get a piece of her — the sequel is admirable for its flair, but it feels less personal, less edgy. In Catching Fire, she comes across as a piece. And now comes the first half of Mockingjay (Part 2 will arrive 12 months from now), and it's apparent that the franchise's striving to coalesce the intimate story of one girl's growing pains and the larger maelstrom of the politics and the revolution in which she's caught. The result is an odd transitional episode, expository, hesitant and slightly claustrophobic. It's still highly watchable, mainly because of the cast and the pawn-or-plotter dilemma that thrusts itself into Katniss's anxious existence. But the splitting of the final instalment into two halves has its price (the filmmakers' and ours), for it's hard not to feel that the material has been spread out too thin.
And if you haven't watched The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, what's going on in Mockingjay is incomprehensible — even if you have, it takes several minutes to connect the threads. In this film, Katniss wakes up inside the subterranean bunkers, corkscrewing into rocky earth, populated by the rebels and lorded over by President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). This underground city of the resistant force is a post-The Matrix, post-post-Metropolis militaristic catacombs — as opposed to The Hunger Games' fatalistic sylvan of Lord Of The Flies. Above them, a civil war has broken out, as the poor and predominantly coloured districts are roused into a revolt, inspired by Katniss's defiance in the Games, against the wealthy Capitol and the cold (and cold-blooded) President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Mockingjay is short on action; Katniss has a new arsenal of explosive arrows designed by a savvy technician resembling Q in James Bond, but she hardly fires any of them. One actually.
If that's a bit of a let-down — especially because the real thrill is 12 months away! — what director Francis Lawrence does shore up here is to throw Katniss into the existential quandary: is she a person or a symbol? Katniss or Mockingjay? A piece or a player? In the first two films, the budding resistance is a ray of hope against the tyranny of the rich ruling class — that's why the three-finger salute is very potent, so much so that it was appropriated by our own dissenters.
In Mockingjay, the web of manipulation gets more complex. The resistance — President Coin, aided by the spin doctors Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his last role), Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) and Effy (Elizabeth Banks) — are exploiting Katniss' heroic image in their own "propos", or propaganda films, and though they're fighting against the evil oppressors, these left-wing fighters display all the qualities of ruthless manipulators.
Katniss' awareness of her dual statuses is what gives the franchise its human dimension; that was strong in The Hunger Games, weak in Catching Fire, and here it's bubbling up again. Her relationship with President Snow and the Capitol — where she became an unlikely sensation and an exotic Joan of Arc — is as complicated as her role within the rebels, who're intent on seeing her as their triumphant symbol. As much as she wants to be a player she's often reduced to a piece. It's worth noting, too, that these underground fighters don't use the romantic three-fingered salute (dear PM Prayuth, no need to worry), but a generic and characterless fist-pumping in the air.
There's a certain disconnect between President Coin's cerebral, media-centric rebellion from inside her command centre and the more visceral uprisings of the population in the districts. The scene at the dam, for instance, has a Les Miserables-inspired, French Revolution urgency and romanticism, ending with what looks like a mass suicide bombing. This feels like the present tense, as opposed to President Coin's futuristic cold war. When Katniss visits a field hospital (that's the only time we see the three-fingered salute), we realise that while the rebels' leadership are mostly white, the poor folks in the outlying districts are mostly coloured. All of them, however, look at up her: Katniss the person or Katniss the emblem?
A revolution is a dirty business, even when the revolutionary is getting rid of something far dirtier. Mockingjay has strong currents running beneath its sombre surface, including the love triangle between Katniss, Peta (Josh Hutcherson), who's survived in the Capitol, and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), her childhood friend and now freedom fighter. But by halving what could've been a one long film however (no one would mind a thrilling 180-minute story), all of these threads are visibly stretched out, diluted, and the momentum that some scenes have gathered are left hanging; even the rescue mission near the end is edited in a way that must function as a climax and a set-up — for the final movie — and it feels neither exciting or anticipatory. In an intended irony only Hollywood can achieve, the story about media manipulation is a prime example of media manipulation, global audiences have no choice but to be dragged along.
Then, it falls down to Jennifer Lawrence. Her appeal is the saving grace, the magnet and the reason Katniss is a complex girl-woman. In war or in love, her confusion is lucid, and either as pawn or plotter, she wades into the ambivalent course with sanity and confidence. It's just too bad that we have to wait another year to see her rise from the ruins of atrocity to prove it once and for all that, indeed, she's a real player.
