Hunger Games leaves fans wanting more
Film
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (M)
3.5 stars
Jennifer Lawrence, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman
DIRECTOR FRANCIS LAWRENCE
REVIEW PIER LEACH
It doesn't matter what anyone says about The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, audiences will flock to it. It features the biggest young star of the moment, Jennifer Lawrence, an Oscar- winner who seems to have equal appeal among young men and young women.
It has also garnered a legion of devoted fans who have read Suzanne Collins' trilogy and seen Gary Ross' (The Hunger Games) and Francis Lawrence's (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) first two instalments.
So the fact that the producers chose to divide the relatively slender final book into two films, without the Harry Potter excuse of being so dense as to warrant a two-part finale, can be viewed in two ways - as an obvious strategy to extract maximum dollars at the box office, or a welcome slice of delayed gratification.
The latter is just fine but the net effect is that Lawrence's second effort (he will direct the final film as well) was always going to feel like an in-betweener. Indeed, newcomers to the franchise will find themselves hungry for context in the film's first 30 minutes.
Fans, though, are sure to be swept right back into Katniss Everdeen's (Lawrence, no relation to the director) plight to save the impoverished masses of the story's futuristic districts from the control of the wealthy Capitol - the same bored upper classes who relished the Darwinian spectacle that was the focus of the first two films.
Despite the absence of the Hunger Games in Mockingjay, after the tournaments' Truman Show-like arena was destroyed in the last instalment, a revolution is brewing in the subterranean District 13. After saving Katniss in the last film, its president Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) is strategising with former game master and defector Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his final role) to bring down the Capitol.
Katniss is the titular Mockingjay, the revolution's reluctant poster girl whom Coin and Heavensbee are grooming to rally the masses. In fact, they hire an entire team, led by Natalie Dormer's Cressida, to pit Katniss against the Capitol by tracking her forays into the districts and posting her growing determination for all the people to see.
It is the story's thematic concerns with media manipulation and flat-out propaganda that make for most interesting bits in Mockingjay - themes that have run through the entire series but are taken to a new level here with swirling questions about power and exploitation.
Lawrence remains the film's emotional anchor; to Katniss's credit, she just can't fake feeling in the way Coin wants her to, which of course makes her all the more admirable. There is nowhere near the same amount of pure action as in previous films but the deepening of both plot and character development in Mockingjay bode well for the anticipated finale.
Katniss's love triangle with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) intensifies, while a cast of some of the finest actors around, including Hoffman, Moore, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks and Donald Sutherland enrich the futuristic fable with sheer screen authority.
It is a more sombre-looking affair than the fantasy worlds of the previous instalments, burrowed for long sections beneath ground with the players clad largely in army attire, without the extravagant, bizarre costuming of the Capitol. It's less fantastical, more old school, war-movie strategising - a move that lends the film some more realistic action-movie thrills.
Lorde curates a strong, evocative soundtrack from the likes of the Chemical Brothers, Grace Jones, Simon Le Bon, her cover of Ladder Song and her own moody anthem Yellow Flicker Beat.
There's no way this could stand alone as a film but it does what it is designed to do - it leaves you wanting more.
