The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Grading & Discussion

Had a preview event last night. Excellent movie. My favorite "wrap up" movie so far of the book/movie franchises. Very well done.

 

I enjoyed it, particularly the dark aspects (although I knew Katniss was going to kill Coin before she even knew). However, I hated how a large chunk of the film was focused on the group slowly struggling to get to Snow's mansion in Capitol...only to have the rebels show up just before Katniss is able to go in and blows everything up. Narratively speaking, that makes the whole thing a giant waste. Yes, the climax was chilling and drove home a lot of points, but it makes the middle utterly pointless other than Finnick dying (and that could've in any form).

 

I liked it. I really think they could have combined this one with the first part. There is a lot of padding throughout the movie. Jennifer Lawrence is amazing in it, but Thor's little brother is a terrible actor. He has the same reaction to a kiss as he does to people dying.

 

That Katniss's rogue mission ends up being kind of pointless (though in terms of character development, it's not; it hardens her, and puts her in the position to see Prim die) is one of the ways the story subverts expectations. It doesn't diminish the resolve and heroism of the people fighting the Capitol, I don't think; Katniss' climactic stand just takes on a very different form.

I thought the movie was very good overall. First and foremost, I don't think there's ever been a better YA film lead performance than what Jennifer Lawrence has done in these four movies; she owns this role, and if the Academy were a bit more interesting in its choices I'd argue she should have earned at least one of her nominations for the work she does here.

The rest of the cast is generally very good, and the experience of watching leads to lots of spot-the-actor moments (I'm not sure why they got Gwendoline Christie for one scene); I guess Katniss' two romantic interests could have been handled better, though I quite like Hutcherson's work in the series. Sutherland is an absolutely terrific villain -- he plays the bad guy a lot, so that's not novel, but it's nice to see him doing it in a first-rate production, rather than slumming, as he so often has been in the last long while.

It's too bad Hoffman didn't get to film his final scene with Katniss, but I thought using Haymitch instead was a decent substitute.

One thing from the book that I missed was the extended Katniss/Johanna training sequences, but I understand why they cut that. It's too bad, in that Johanna as a result is little more than a cameo in the Mockingjay films, but the movie was busy enough without spending a lot of time just to establish why Johanna isn't going into battle.

 

That scene actually worked a little better with Haymitch given that he was usually the one sent to deal with her in the other films.

 

Just returned from the movie and gave it a B-

It's better than Mockingjay 3.1 but it's not perfect but this may be also due to the source material and not the movie's fault.

What i liked is that nobody seemed to be safe.. people we liked were killed at a moments notice and for those who didn't know what was going to happen beforehand the death of Prim may have been a shocker.

However i can't put my finger on it but that pivotal event and the personal fallout for Katniss felt somewhat flat. Yes she loses it when she returns home and sees Prim's cat but other than that it seemed to miss something.

Her scenes with Snow were brilliant though.. Sutherland owned his role the same as Lawrence owned it and his gleeful outburst when she shoots Coin before he gets ripped apart by the mob was just well played.

Best part for me was the tense advance through the tunnels and the subsequent losses though the movie (and perhaps the books) fail to make us really care for those the team loses because we have met them just now (apart from Finnick).

Finnick's death though was gruesome and very tragic but it drove the point well home that there would be losses and not even named actors would be spared (though i think no one expected the leads to buy it at any time).

Mentioning Coin it also came as somewhat out of left field that she turned out to become Snow 2.0. Yes, she was a wartime leader and she used Katniss for propaganda but at no point (or i have already forgotten it) did she display vile tendencies such as Snow which made the roundtable scene with the Hunger Games winners all the more surprising.

I don't think these movies will become classics, no matter the hype. I'll rewatch them surely in the years to come but i doubt they'll get cult status 5 or 10 years from now.

 

Possible spoilers

I feel this is where the film dropped the ball a little bit in terms of adapting the book for the screen. The film made Coin seem too nice IMO.

Did anyone catch that there was an actor from Star Trek TNG in a small role in this film?

 

I really wish at some point that could have worked a reference to getting Munsoned in there for Haymitch. Because in a lot of ways, wasn't the whole Hunger Games, a really dark Kingpin?

 

Thoroughly enjoyed this. Some solid performances from Lawrence and Sutherland. Moore was quite chilling and disturbing in her last few scenes. Some of the casualties came as quite a surprise to me, some quite shocking really.

All in all, The Hunger Games as a whole, really are quite disturbing. So many parts of the story give me chills, probably because you can see some of it happening in real life. Using people for brutal entertainment is part of our history, dictators like Snow are not at all unheard of. Drinks that can make you puke so you can keep on eating and enjoying without gaining weight.... I can think of people would like that. The shiny, lovely facade of Capitol where live is supposedly beautiful but underneath.... Showhosts like Caeser Flickerman, how many of those don't we already have. Sure, not as colorfull , but they are there. It makes for a fictional world that every now and then makes you like around and wonder.

 

I gave it a B+. Most of it was fairly riveting but in the last quarter or so, the emotional connection got lost for me--it fell flat. It felt very rushed and disconnected. I thought the previous film was more successful in engaging the audience.

This was good...but not great.

 

I thought it was a bit long and really didn't take until they got to the capital. We meet several characters whom we don't get to really know before they're killed off. And I thought Coin was suspect from the start, although the mob killing off Snow was poetic justice I supose, it's a shame Katniss didn't get to kill off Snow as well. I guess for Katniss and Peeta there was a happy ending, but t he bigger picture was a bit vague. It might've been nice to see how the social structure of Pamen had changed.

 

I think one of the producers said in the bonus material of the first movie that the fictional world of the hunger games was like our society to the Nth degree. I myself have thought it was like a cross between Roman gladiator games and a reality show like Survivor.

 

I never read the books, but I felt this whole movies series was pretty "meh." Not bad...just not worth all the hype and money it's made. After four movies, I still don't care about a single character.

And I don't think I will ever understand the popularity of Jennifer Lawrence.

 

As I recall, Dakota Blue Richards was just as impressive in The Golden Compass, though the rest of the movie let her down. Of course, Lyra is a much more active and interesting character than Katniss, and Lawrence absolutely could have played a steelier heroine had that been the role. She's more active in Days of Future Past than any of these movies, and she's only a supporting/ensemble part there.

My final thoughts overall: it was a bold and creative choice to focus on a heroine who, apart from a skill at archery, isn't particularly bright or interested in what's going on around her, and who is in no way a Chosen One. (Harry Potter wasn't the brightest bulb either, of course, but he at least was curious about the larger goings-on, and had Hermione on hand to keep him informed.) And of course the recurring treatment of PTSD puts the series on much deeper thematic waters than anything in Rowling's Wizarding Wonderland. So, points for boldness.

That said, just because the heroine isn't a Chosen One doesn't mean it's not a missed opportunity, dramatically speaking, to have her be so indifferent to the politics around her. The big choice she makes in assassinating Coin works, and I get that the whole point of the series is that she isn't a superhero who necessarily survives the big battle with all her faculties intact in order to be the first to storm the castle, but do I think there could have been a more interesting, and certainly more cinematic, middle path.

(Also, headscratcher of the year: our heroes hide out in a fashion/makeup artist's den, and then apply no makeup whatsoever when joining a crowd of people looking for them? Whhhhaaaaa?)

After seeing both Parts... I'm still not sold on Julianne Moore's performance. I spent the whole first movie wondering how someone so soft-spoken and mild-seeming could have become and remained a political/war leader, and I'm still wondering. And it's not a question of Moore's abilities; she could very well have played a lot steelier than she did. Was her mildness just designed to throw us off, then? If so, I don't think it was needed, and her sudden villainous turn was a tad trite. (When she proposed a "final, symbolic Hunger Games", I was all, "huh? 'Symbolic' as in 'touch football', in which Capitol kids compete with paint-filled balloons or something, and don't actually die? ... No? You mean a real Hunger Games, for 'symbolic' purposes? That's... rather sudden of you.")

And that final epilogue scene, after the perfectly adequate bedroom moment, was some bulls***.

Conclusion: it's all "fine". A decent film series, better than Harry Potter, which I suspect will age poorly due to its utter lack of ambiguity (once you know who's entirely good and who's entirely bad, there's not much else to chew on), but, despite being more complex, is nowhere near as mythic and memorable as Lord of the Rings.

 

B.

Between part 1 and part 2 there was enough material to make a solid A movie, but of course with their attempt at a cash grab by splitting the (already sub-par) book into two, quality suffered.

 

I haven't read the book, but from what I understand, the Mockingjay movies are pretty faithful adaptations, especially plot-wise. Either part could have been trimmed by 15-20 minutes, maybe, but I think I'd have gotten pretty darn bored with these characters had I been asked to sit through one big 3.5-hour movie. To remove an additional hour from that would probably have necessitated significant narrative adjustments, as trying to cover the same plot points in half the time would have resulted in dramatic shambles. So, in order to make avoid making a bad movie, the studio probably figured they could make two okay ones or one good (but fan-angering) one. Based on the money they made, it's hard to fault their decision, IMO.

 

F I can't believe how bad this movie is. It's like they took a bunch of random scenes from other movies and just mixed them together. No narrative to speak of and it's just plain boring.

It was the biggest telecom project in history because the director, writers, actors, everyone just phoned it in.