{"id":18567,"date":"2015-11-26T22:40:01","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T12:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=18567"},"modified":"2015-11-26T22:51:18","modified_gmt":"2015-11-26T12:51:18","slug":"the-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=18567","title":{"rendered":"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mockingjay2poster\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Director: \u00a0<\/strong>Francis Lawrence
\nWriter: \u00a0<\/strong>Peter Craig, Danny Strong
\nCast: \u00a0<\/strong>Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson<\/p>\n

This review contains major spoilers.<\/i><\/p>\n

W<\/span>e all know how the final chapter ends. \u00a0The Return of the King. \u00a0Return of the Jedi. \u00a0The Deathly Hallows.<\/em><\/p>\n

The final act\u00a0is\u00a0a predictable but enjoyable chapter in the Hero’s Journey. \u00a0When the Hero realizes their full potential and, along with their friends, finally reach and confront the Big Bad. \u00a0There’s a huge climactic battle. \u00a0Some allies fall along the way. Ultimately, there’s a happy ending and goodness prevails. \u00a0Everything about the first two instalments of Suzanne Collins’\u00a0The Hunger Games<\/em> suggested that we should expect the same here.<\/p>\n

It was Mockingjay Part 1<\/em>\u00a0that began to deviate from the script. \u00a0It was a surprisingly bleak and morbid affair where the light hearted antics of Effie and Haymitch took a back seat to a cautionary and\u00a0moralistic tale about modern warfare. \u00a0The film was less about the heroics of a plucky young woman leading a rebellion against a tyrant and more about the toll taken on innocent bystanders. \u00a0There were shots of destroyed medical facilities, drone warfare and the filming of propaganda footage that seems eerily evocative of what we see happening on the news in Syria. \u00a0Who expected\u00a0that<\/em> in their Hunger Games<\/em>\u00a0movie? \u00a0Not I.<\/p>\n

Mockingjay Part 2 <\/em>stays the course and leads the film down a path I would not have expected in the slightest. \u00a0The\u00a0rebellion that Katniss joins? \u00a0They’re lead by the cunning and Machiavellian Alma Coin who seems indifferent to Katniss’ worth beyond functioning as a propaganda tool to encourage the underclass to take arms against President Snow. \u00a0Those two boys that are Katniss’ love interests? \u00a0One of them – the vanilla Peeta Mellark –\u00a0turns into\u00a0a quivering psychotic who lays their hands on Katniss to literally attempt to throttle the life out of her after they\u00a0are captured and tortured to the point of having their spirits broken. \u00a0The other – the commanding Gale Hawthorne – reveals themselves to be a little bit too\u00a0American Sniper<\/em>, whose ‘win the war at any cost’ approach betrays a shocking willingness to inflict civilian causalities as a war strategy.<\/p>\n

There’s a final battle at the entrance to The Capitol. \u00a0But its not like the final showdown at Hogwarts or the battle on the second Death Star. \u00a0Like\u00a0Mockingjay Part 1<\/em>, its less about good guys and bad guys exchanging gun fire, but more shades of modern combat, where people are killed seemingly at random\u00a0by IEDs, trip mines and armed drones. \u00a0The Peacekeepers, the armed forces of President Snow, seem to be the least of anyone’s problems.<\/p>\n

\u00a0All throughout\u00a0Mockingjay – Part 2<\/em>, Katniss is driven by revenge and a desire to kill President Snow. \u00a0But the jokes on her because he is already on death’s door, terminally ill and coughing up blood. \u00a0Alma Coin wants to film footage of Katniss advancing on The Capital to boost the morale of the troops and perhaps frame the expectations of the audience who would expect her to do something similar. \u00a0But The Capital has already fallen and President Snow has already lost. \u00a0The film doesn’t even show the fall of The Capital. \u00a0We see the conflict from Katniss’ viewpoint and the last thing she sees is the carpet bombing of innocent children that also claims the life of her sister Prim. \u00a0When she wakes up, the war is already over.<\/p>\n

\"mockingjay2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By this point, I felt I had the rug well and truly pulled out from beneath me. \u00a0Where was this story going? \u00a0It doesn’t take long to find out. \u00a0During a council meeting, Alma Coin invokes a new Hunger Games to sate the bloodlust of the people in the Districts who are eager to gain a measure of revenge on the former citizens of the Capital. \u00a0The Hunger Games<\/em> isn’t a retelling of\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>. \u00a0It’s a modern day\u00a0Animal Farm<\/em> and Coin is its Napoleon.<\/p>\n

The penultimate scene is set in an arena where Katniss is tasked with being the public executor of President Snow in front of Alma Coin and the new citizens of The Capital. \u00a0As she draws her bow upon a dying President Snow, Katniss attempts to end the cycle of violence with one final bloody act.<\/p>\n

The film’s denouement gives audiences cause for muted celebration. \u00a0Katniss lives in exile on the farmlands of her home district. \u00a0She suffers PTSD and weeps at the sight of anything that conjures memories of her sister. \u00a0She has a family with Peeta who himself has never fully recovered from the torture inflicted upon him. \u00a0There’s a tender but melancholic moment that Katniss and Peeta share on their bed where Peeta seeks reassurance from Katniss that her love for him is real. \u00a0He’s not asking this\u00a0playfully, but because his mind is shattered and he needs reassurance. \u00a0He is a broken man and you get the feeling that Katniss is probably all that holds him together.<\/p>\n

As the end credits rolled and I digested what I just witnessed, I had several thoughts. \u00a0Firstly, surprise at the direction the film took. \u00a0Secondly, I admired the enterprise that Collins had and the producers of this film for having the brass balls to take the story down such a dark and twisted path. \u00a0Lastly, I wondered what everyone else thought. \u00a0The film reviewed well enough, sitting at a respectable 71% on Rotten Tomatoes at time of writing. \u00a0But unlike The Return of the King<\/i> or\u00a0The Deathly Hallows<\/em>, the takings at the box office are down compared to the previous entries in the series. \u00a0I can understand that. \u00a0It’s certainly not for everybody.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I wonder what the lasting legacy of\u00a0The Hunger Games<\/em> will be. \u00a0It has made a star out of Jennifer Lawrence. \u00a0It appears to have opened the door to leading roles for women in fantasy epics with\u00a0Divergent<\/em> and the new\u00a0Star Wars<\/em> films being the notable beneficiaries (a welcome trend given the absolute sausage factory that is Marvel super hero films). \u00a0I expect that the series will be looked back upon quite favourably. \u00a0It has a fantastic lead performance from Lawrence, peerless production design and an interesting and unconventional narrative. \u00a0Having never read the books, I had no idea what to expect when I saw the first film in the series three years ago. \u00a0All things considered, I’m pretty happy with what we got.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hunger Games Quadrilogy concludes with a surprisingly dark final chapter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":18569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[771,2091,1224,2340],"class_list":["post-18567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-jennifer-lawrence","tag-liam-hemsworth","tag-the-hunger-games","tag-woody-harrelson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18567"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18590,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18567\/revisions\/18590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}