The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

I didn’t care for the previous Hunger Games films – or, indeed, the novels. I didn’t like Katniss or Peeta, and disliked how the first film took all the easiest options and never explored the genuinely interesting dilemmas it hinted at. The second film very much annoyed me for almost completely repeating the first film, only with less emotionally interesting things in it. The contents of the first film could essentially have been a prologue, and this film was where it could have quickly gone.

And I have to say, this was a much better film than its predecessors. It had big problems, mostly down to following the trend of splitting final films in big female-fandom franchises into two and thus having pacing and narrative issues, but it was much more interesting in general. No more stupid game. No more pretence that this ridiculously evil dictatorship could actually suppress the proletariat. 

This is classic good vs evil as the rebels in the militarised District 13 – thought to have been destroyed - have Katniss. But the Capitol have Peeta. First the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character has to convince Katniss to take part in his propaganda – and it takes indirectly causing the deaths of dozens to spur her into action – but she is soon firing up the masses. This leads to impressive scenes of terrorist attacks on the government – but it’s all good because we know the government is evil so this time terrorism is what we support. The action is kept nice and fast, there are some genuinely funny moments and the angle that Peeta is being used against Katniss – while she is convinced he’s being tortured – provides some interesting depth. The love triangle with Gale is also interesting, though it’s very, very obvious he’s going to have to be killed off because Collins always solves her dilemmas the easy way.

The problem is that the last act is very slow. There’s a protracted attack on the underground bunker, which is meant to be tense but is just boring. Then all power in the Capitol goes down because one dam is destroyed by a random force of rebels, and instead of using the chance to invade, break down the borders or neutralising as many enemy military targets as possible, the rebels use this time to extract Peeta. It leads to the big cliffhanger, and does make sense in narrative terms even if also attacking other targets seems like common sense, but it’s done too slowly, and attempts to seem grown-up by hinting that Snow pimps out his Hunger Games winners (ooh the decadence) ring hollow.

But there are none of the huge glaring problems I had with the previous films, and it’s settled into a much more interesting classic battle against an evil dictatorship. Katniss will never be likeable...but the next film may still be interesting.