Most revolutions are started by idealists but are finished by despots - quote from My History of the World.
We knew, going in, that we’d be running the gauntlet through a horde of caffeinated 15 year old girls on opening weekend, but what the heck. At least it got the series over for me, unless the usual rumors of a sequel, prequel, Mockingjay on Mars, or whatever, comes true. It’s time for the 4th movie in a 3 book series to come to its conclusion. The Hunger Games series, in case you were hiding under a rock, left us at the point where the the revolution against the rule of the wicked President Snow was getting serious. Our hero, Katniss Everdeen, was chafing at being used as a media icon by the dubious and creepy Alma Coin, president of one of the districts, a leader who emerged with a hidden subterranean complex full of rebels and weapons in the last half-book of the series. The ever cute Peeta Melark had been retrieved from Snow, brainwashed to kill Katniss; he nearly finished the job.
As the new chapter begins, Katniss is nursing choke bruises, a damaged voice, and general trauma, but wants to get back in the fight. Things have gone really bad in the districts (bombings) but the revolution is starting to make people in the capitol nervous. Snow has a defensive plan to allow the revolutionaries into the outer part of the city, withdraw his supporters into the center and mine everything at the periphery, destroying the invading army. The mines are like a computer game on steroids, every sort of flamey, choppy, crushy, blow-upy thing that can be thought up will be used against the rebels who will try to run, shoot and jump past all this.
There’s a lot of latin in this story so, I’ll use one expression - “deus ex machina” to describe the fact that there’s also a set of creepy subterranean passageways that lead right to the capitol and Snow’s palace (why in the world would they build that?). Katniss’s plan is to take a small unit in there and get to the palace. Early in the movie she states quite clearly that her main goal is to kill Snow…plain out dead. She wants to avenge her dead family and friends and wants to end this thing here and now. Once all of these forces are set in motion, the rest of the movie is the playing of the game. If you notice, my quote from History is that MOST revolutions are finished by despots. Will that happen here? You know if you read the books but I’m not telling. You might also notice that the whole series is specked with references to ancient Rome, like a lot of names…Castor, Pollux, Cressida, Messala, Antonius, Caesar, Pugnax and Arelius. This story seems to have its parallels in the rise of the Empire and the end of the Roman Republic, but I think we’re hoping that it will go the other way in this movie
Well…all that aside, did I like it? Well…sorta. I enjoyed the endless action, which is well staged. The FX are well integrated into the story and the whole thing looks really good. You don’t get the feeling of a lot of animation stuck on top of green screen human action. The visuals are really good. It’s really a visually fun movie, that should look good in any format, well worth all the money spent on it. The film will certainly return boat-loads of tickets to the company. My admiration ends there, however. The script is padded and inflated. Making two movies out of one book seems like mainly a way to get all those legions of fans to cough up two ticket charges…not in service of the story. As for the acting, the main characters, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Snow (Donald Sutherland), Coin (Julianna Moore), Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) are is about the same as in the other films, not doing themselves any disservice. It’s definitely a movie that’s about action, not acting. Most of the acting is about someone making a preachy speech or running and screaming, all the stuff of a TV series…professional craft, but nothing exceptional. My biggest question is about Plutarch (another Roman name), played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Was this shot before his death or virtualized on film? I don’t know, but if he WAS virtual, real actors should be very nervous. Direction was by Francis Lawrence, who keeps the pace about right, knows how to construct a movie like this and who did no harm to his career. There was one sequence which really make me chuckle. In the tunnels, the group ran into some sort of mutants and had a big fight. It all seemed very familiar to me and then I realized that it looked like a zombie fight on the Walking Dead. Seeing that HG was shot in Georgia, I could not avoid wondering whether a Walking Dead crew did the mutant fight too. There was a lot of grabbing, biting and head stabbing…the usual components of a zombie attack.
So, this was my week’s piece of pop entertainment. I don’t think it was bad, but I wasn’t crazy about it, and I am glad that it’s over now and I really hope that it won’t spawn sequels. For better or worse, let the series stand. Judging by the noise in the theater, the Hunger Games fans were quite pleased, so I guess the producers did their jobs right. I give it a solid 3. Everybody did their jobs, the look was good, the fans were pleased, but it would not rise above that.
