The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 (2014) ***½

     The last time we saw Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), she was fucking up the live TV broadcast of the Quarter Quell with an act of defiance surpassing even her trick with the deadly nightshade at the close of the 74th Annual Hunger Games the year before. In the ensuing confusion, she and her allies in the arena, Beetee (Jeffrey Wright) and Finnick Odair (Sam Claffin), were airlifted to safety aboard a hoverjet captained by, of all people, Chief Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whom Katniss had reasonably reckoned as an antagonist second only to supreme Panem dictator President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Equally wondrous, from where Katniss was sitting, were the other passengers already aboard the vehicle: her mother (Paula Malcomson), her sister (Willow Shields), and her boyfriend back home, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth). (Katniss’s hard-drinking coach, Haymitch Abernathy [Woody Harrelson], and District 12 Hunger Games liaison Effie Trinket [Elizabeth Banks] were onboard, too, but she was understandably less happy to see either of them.) The object of this startling extraction was to ferry the most troublesome people in Panem to District 13— the hottest hotbed of revolutionary fervor during the Treason 75 years earlier, which official history records as having been obliterated in nuclear holocaust. Reports of the district’s demise were evidently somewhat exaggerated. The news wasn’t all good, however. For one thing, Heavensbee had to prioritize during the rescue, and both Johanna Mason (Jena Malone), the taker of absolutely no shit from District 7, and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), Katniss’s boyfriend in the eyes of her television fanbase, were left behind in the arena. Even worse, President Snow’s retribution for the girl’s troublemaking was swift and terrible indeed. No sooner had he fully processed what happened at the end of the Quarter Quell than he ordered aloft a squadron of bombers to turn the coal country of District 12 into one giant Centralia, Pennsylvania. So far as Gale knows, he, Haymitch, the Everdeen family, and maybe Peeta are the only sometime residents of 12 left alive.

     Now let’s talk about District 13 for a bit. The place was the site of all Panem’s high-tech industry before the Treason, and it may have been the principal recruiting ground for the military as well. Just the people best positioned to give the Capital fits by rising in rebellion, right? The regime really did nuke District 13 into the next best thing to oblivion during the civil war, but because one of the district’s major industries was nuclear power, it was suitably well equipped with blast-resistant and radiation-proof underground bunkers, some of them large enough to accommodate entire settlements for years at a time. 13’s leaders rebuilt their ravaged homes within the bowels of the Earth, and for the last three generations, they and their people have been gathering strength for a rematch. The emergence of this Everdeen girl changes the calculus, however. The government of District 13 keeps tabs on developments all over Panem, and President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore, from Children of Men and Seventh Son) is well aware of the spirit of dissent and disobedience that has been roiling all the districts ever since Katniss’s unprecedented performance in the Hunger Games last year. Coin and her predecessors had always thought in terms of an overwhelming offensive that would cripple the regime at the first blow, but given the way Everdeen has the oppressed peoples of Panem riled up, maybe the attack doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Maybe it just has to be strong enough to convince the proles outside the Capital that there’s something to be gained by rising up in support.

     That’s where Plutarch, Haymitch, and Effie come in. Heavensbee, mass-media maestro that he is, believes that Katniss represents a propaganda opportunity without peer in living memory. With her as their spokesmodel, District 13 will begin broadcasting literal commercials for revolution onto every unsecured television channel in Panem. And with the survivors of Everdeen’s Hunger Games publicity team to guide their creation, these outlaw transmissions are sure to have an impact comparable to her performances in the games. There’s something rather important that Plutarch has omitted from his calculations, however. The real masterminds behind the Katniss Everdeen phenomenon were Cinna the stylist, who’s dead now, and Peeta Mellark— who turns out to be still alive, but a prisoner in the Capital. Katniss never listened to Haymitch or Effie about anything, and far from being a naturally charismatic leader type, she’s a sullen, uncooperative loner. The only thing she’s likely to inspire, left to her own devices, is a slap upside the head. Worse yet, Heavensbee’s successor as President Snow’s communications director (Sarita Choudhury, from The Green Knight and Evil Eye) is a step ahead of the rebels, and has Peeta on TV for regular sitdowns with Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci)— the latter having been reinvented as the Capital’s answer to Anderson Cooper— to deliver a message of pacifist reconciliation. Maybe the regime is putting words into his mouth like they’ve been trying to do since the beginning, but nobody in 13 is much inclined to give Mellark the benefit of that doubt. Either way, it’s a shrewd line of counterprogramming, and Peeta’s chats with Flickerman are a hell of a lot more convincing than the unbearably cheesy agitprop spots that result from Heavensbee’s first several efforts to transform Katniss into the “Mockingjay,” his longed-for personification of righteous revolt.

     It’s Haymitch, believe it or not, who finds the Philosopher’s Stone for that media alchemy. Everything Katniss ever did to fire anyone’s imagination was an off-the-cuff reaction to having her life or that of someone she cared about put in danger, right? So if Plutarch wants a revolutionary figurehead that people can believe in, the only thing for it is to send the girl into harm’s way, where she can be her authentic, ornery, truculent self. It needn’t be a potentially deadly situation, either. It just has to be stressful enough to trip Katniss’s finely honed fight-or-flight reflex. For example, maybe she could visit a field hospital full of banged-up rebel fighters and their terrified, wretched loved ones. The next thing Katniss knows, she’s being herded onto another hoverjet in company with Gale and a small video-recording crew led by a girl not much older than herself called Cressida (Natalie Dormer, of Patient Zero and The Forest), all of them renegades from the Capital. The magic Heavensbee was hoping for doesn’t really come together, though, until an airstrike from the regime hits the already half-ruined building, giving Katniss a chance to do something spontaneously, suicidally, and above all telegenically courageous. Not even Peeta’s possibly coerced pleas for peace can counteract the optics of a girl shooting explosive-tipped arrows at bombers while they blow up a hospital!

     Now the one thing that Katniss herself has been truly strategic about during her tenure as mascot of the revolution is that her continued performance as the Mockingjay is contingent first upon her hosts someday making a good-faith effort to spring Peeta and the rest of remaining Quarter Quell survivors from captivity, and secondly upon all of them receiving full amnesty from Coin’s government, no matter how embittered toward any of them her people might become. The president resents that at first, but as the propaganda war between District 13 and the Capital heats up, she realizes that it would be in her interest, too, to rescue Peeta and the others as soon as possible. So long as the Mellark boy is in Snow’s hands, Katniss is susceptible to blackmail— and that goes just as much for Fennick and Beetee, who also have people they care about in the regime’s custody. A successful extraction raid would therefore deprive Snow of a formidable weapon, and help to secure the outsiders’ loyalties to 13. In fact, it would deprive Snow of two formidable weapons, for smuggling Peeta specifically out of the Capital would shut down the regime’s entire counter to Heavensbee’s Mockingjay initiative. Coin— and indeed Katniss as well— should know by now, though, that President Snow is always thinking three moves ahead, and can be counted on to have a knight or a bishop waiting to pounce on anyone who tries to take one of his pawns.

     In Suzanne Collins’s telling, Mockingjay was just one book. It got turned into two movies not because there was too much plot or action for just one, but rather because once the greedheads at Warner Brothers got away with bifurcating Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, everybody else in the business wanted a piece of that double-dipping action, too. One of the routine pitfalls for this pernicious trend is that the second film in the diptych gets shortchanged of source material, and has to stretch itself intolerably thin to reach feature length, while the first makes illusory promises of tight and streamlined pacing. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay is a case in point. We’ll talk about Mockingjay, Part 2’s pacing woes later, but Part 1 is a beautifully efficient machine. The shortest film in the series at just over two hours, it moves quickly without ever feeling rushed, and gives just the right amount of space and attention to all of its subplots, major characters, themes, and story beats. And what’s at least equally impressive, Mockingjay, Part 1 simultaneously avoids the second routine pitfall for adaptations that split single books into two or even three films.

     Whereas the typical book-splitter ends part one on a contrived and annoying cliffhanger, this movie concludes on an unresolved but narratively satisfying downbeat, in approximately the same spirit as The Empire Strikes Back. Interestingly, however, that was not originally the plan. As initially conceived, Mockingjay, Part 1 was to have left the audience in suspense as to the nature of the trap Snow laid for the rescue mission, but director Francis Lawrence decided during production that the scene meant to open Part 2 really needed to close out this film instead. He was absolutely right about that, too. Indeed, I’ll go further: the planned ending was nothing short of storytelling malpractice, all but certain to engender even more ill will from the audience than the Mockingjay twins already received just from people who were sore at Lionsgate for strong-arming an extra movie ticket out of them. (And lest you question whether anyone would really have gotten that pissed off, you’re currently reading the words of a guy who sat out Across the Spiderverse out of sheer spite over Into the Spiderverse’s bullshit cliffhanger.) The ending we actually got, on the other hand, is a genuine, organic stopping point that, had I seen this movie in 2014, would have left me twitching with eagerness to know what happens next without feeling cheated out of narrative closure. So good job on that much, anyway.

     Mind you, if we’re talking strictly about Mockingjay, Part 1, then Lawrence, together with writers Peter Craig and Danny Strong, did a damn good job right across the board— it’s only the need to take the following film into account that diminishes this one. What I most appreciate about Mockingjay, Part 1 is that this time there’s no arena, no contest, no retracing any of the old terrain from the previous two installments. Mockingjay is fundamentally a war story, and in Part 1 at least, it makes no concessions to any notion the viewer might have that it should duplicate the structure of its predecessors. It incorporates into the architecture of the film itself the idea that the time for games is over, and that the stakes are now nothing less than the future of an entire civilization. The change in format furthermore signals the maturation of The Hunger Games from teen-friendly dystopia to serious consideration of the options available for overthrowing an entrenched tyranny (but still couched in terms that teens ought to find legible and relatable). Even the love-triangle plot thread starts taking on overtones of revolutionary struggle, as Peeta and Gale adopt contrary positions on the strategy and tactics of rebellion to raise the stakes of their pre-existing rivalry for Katniss’s heart. And holy shit, was this movie ever prescient about how showbiz was on the verge of polluting politics beyond any hope of restoration! There was always an element of that in the Hunger Games films, but this one moves the theme front and center, and keeps it there throughout. Crucially too, Mockingjay, Part 1 never lets the issue crystallize comfortably into a dichotomy between the rebels’ righteous authenticity and the regime’s corrupt media manipulation. Coin and her government are as image-conscious, as media-savvy, as quick to pounce on an opportunity to spin the narrative of the war as Snow’s is— and what’s more, her people are as susceptible to the spin from both sides as those of the Capital. Craig and Strong were perceptive enough to recognize and honest enough to acknowledge that no profound cultural transformation is ever really reversible, so that once statecraft has merged with entertainment to the extent that it has in Panem, there’s no way to win a political struggle without being at least as entertaining as your opponent.

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