The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 2
Nov. 21st, 2015 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessI went to see Mockingjay part 2 last night in a very full cinema, so I had to pay careful attention to my seat allocation, which I rarely see the point of. I still think that they should have ushers lead people when it’s a packed cinema on the opening weekend of a massive movie if they must have stupid seat allocations (I’m fine with first come, first served).
As someone who hasn’t read the books, I went into this relatively unspoiled, I mean, I was fairly certain Katniss and Peeta would make it out alive, a little more traumatised, but end up together, and Snow and the Capitol would be overthrown. I’d only seen the one trailer and not even on the big screen, so I hadn’t had a chance to overanalyse it. I have been spending the last couple of weeks rewatching the other films on DVD, leavening it with cheerier stuff.
SUZANNE COLLINS, YOU KILLED PRIM! How could you? Well, that’s what the seat of my emotions says. The rest of me knows it was one of the worst things that could have happened to Katniss – losing Peeta or worse having to kill him by her own hand would have been jostling for the position too. It changed how she saw past and future. And I will give them props for it being clear that Prim actively volunteered to be there, but, but...I was a stunned, angry, quivering wreck for the rest of the movie.
For, of course, the first scene that got something in my eye was Katniss dancing with Prim after having decided she’d leave 13 for the Capitol to execute Snow, and saying goodbye to Prim and Prim sort of reading it on her face. (After a few seconds, my mental commentary was that everyone at the dance should have seen that Katniss Was Up To Something then in the midst of the special effect. It went on too long.) But those two. SESTRAS.
Although the love triangle was important (and I adore that it was as much about what they all believed in and did as their feelings), Katniss’s platonic relationships with so many others, from Haymitch (<3) and the other fellow Victors, to new allies Boggs and Cressida and Pollux were important too, not to mention Snow and Coin.
Family-wise, it broke my heart a little that Katniss’s mother was written out of things after she was first at Katniss’s bedside post Prim’s death. I mean, they’d both lost Prim, which should bring them together, even if Katniss’s mother couldn’t know what else her daughter had been through like Haymitch and Peeta could. I would have traded the cat for Katniss’s mother towards the end at the Victor’s Village. In fact, I quite seriously would – the audience laughed, but I was mainly snarking at how it got from District 13 to 12. Even a dog would have been pushing it, frankly.
Their mother choosing to follow on in Prim’s footsteps and do medical work was but a band-aid, she could have done that after mourning with Katniss. And though I know this is based on YA novels and distancing yourself from you parents is a healthy standard in books for young people, and though her mother wasn’t there for her before, if you don’t prize Katniss’s relationship with her mother after such loss, you rather take the shine off Katniss’s relationship with her epilogue kiddies for me.
Ahem.
I was also aggrieved that they felt that Peeta had to explain that the flowers he was holding were primroses. They’d been so subtle and trusting of the audience with Prim’s death. What other flowers were we meant to think he’d found? Kingsfoil???
Storywise, well, I had lowered expectations, because I don’t think Collins’ worldbuilding (as viewed through the prism of the films) was ever that fully developed. She’d had the lightning strike of the games and the propaganda of the oppressors, but what came outside of that was never as strong. It felt like she must have been relieved when she realised that Katniss’s unit’s final march on the Capitol could work as a sort of 76th Hunger Games – I didn’t feel that we went through the exact same beats as we did in Catching Fire, but I’ll keep an eye out for that when I next see it (more likely to be on DVD than on the big screen). For me, war = the arena was as confusing a parallel as it was a helpful one.
Rewatching part 1, I had been thinking about how the western world is the Capitol, really – it hadn’t been so striking before because I’d been identifying so much with Katniss. I loved her moral struggle in this, how she both was and wasn’t the Mockingjay, the symbol who wanted to be doing something, partly because she was hurting and running, partly because she wanted to help. She became a self-appointed executioner quite early on – very much looking the assassin in her cloak (WHY didn’t she put on some make-up to disguise her face at that point?) even though Katniss doesn’t do stealth.
Jackson (like Coin) had called her a soldier – ha, no, and meant it as a compliment. While it suited Gale, Katniss, no. She had to do this on her own terms. And I liked that Boggs and Patina Miller’s character showed a different side, the professional view of soldiering and that those ethics could not let them accept Coin’s orders unquestioningly. After all, if it’s a war, civilians are different. Katniss knew there were people in the Capitol: Effie, Plutarch, Cressida and her team, the Avoks who weren’t the enemy. Maybe part of the system, not without culpability, even, but not targets.
I loved that we saw so many women in positions of leadership throughout, enough that they were multi-hued.
There was the interplay between being Katniss and being the Mockingjay, and taking the symbol and using it for her own ends, until, for her survival, she had to let the symbol be used by others in their propaganda wars. Ultimately, though, she chose where her arrow was headed. I loved the moment where Haymitch trusted her to have an alternate plan when they agreed to Coin’s no-good plan.
So, we started off with Peeta brainwashed, Katniss without a voice – a recurring theme has been the use of voices, with the singing, the speechifying, the people whose tongues have been cut out, the birds – but slowly regaining it. I did wonder what kind of doctors thought it was right to send Primrose in to see a barely healed Peeta. She was still a kid! And he might be tied down to stop him from being bezerk, but he could still talk and say hateful things about her sister, and she had to talk back and tell him bad things like his family’s deaths – ugh. Maybe it was foreshadowing, for her death, for Coin (as 13’s leader) being willing to sacrifice children, but ugh.
Katniss being made to talk to Peeta then, while it hurt her, was dramatically intriguing. I think a long, hard road where he would have got better would have been more satisfying than siccing him on Katniss and unit in the state he was in and in the terrain they were in, but they just about got away with it by having Boggs put it down to Coin being willing to sacrifice Katniss. (Did Johanna tell Boggs about Katniss’s plan, or was it all part of Katniss thinking she’s being stealthy and everyone else seeing right through her?) Obviously, it added tension, especially after everyone lied for Katniss to keep the hologram and do her mission, undermining Boggs saying she shouldn’t trust ‘them’, which could have meant her unit as much as Coin etc.
Speaking of mental ill-health, where was Annie’s crazy for most of this film? It seemed like her stint in the Capitol had made her all better, unlike Johanna and Peeta. I spent most of their wedding trying to get a better glimpse of what Effie was wearing, although that Finnick had left her to join Katniss’s star unit was heartwarming. And he got a hero’s outing – although Katniss had to do the mercy killing again.
They did a better job on the mutts this time. I bet the briefing was ‘Do better than the first film’ (not a high bar). Showing them leaping out in the dark was more effective, but it all got very confusing until we regressed to everyone having a hero moment (which was how I knew who was still standing). It was no surprise that Gale too would have survived the Games-like scenario, and it was nice that Katniss and Peeta could save each other at this point, but I chortled over Cressida, film director, turning into a gun-wielding survivor. Because I am twisted and inconsistent.
Overall, the character moments were stronger than the action (especially the stuff in darkness), and I think the film knew that.
Sutherland’s Snow was a delight, if you know what I mean. The toast around the table was – well, I expected more than the general to bite it. How Snow felt about Katniss and how ruthless he was and how Sutherland played his dialogue were great.
Coin’s growing ruthlessness was fine, (I didn’t see it developing in Part 1 like they claimed it did in the commentary) and Moore blossomed (in a crowded field, because this was JLaw’s film all day long, Sutherland was brill, Harrelson steals his scenes and we had a pile of relatively complicated supporting characters played by good actors) as the ascending other President.
I loved how things went suddenly all ‘whuh?’ when it had felt like we were following the action movie path of protagonist faces off against antagonist, although the first seed that we were going to be derailed off that track was what I took to be Snow inviting all the civilians to be his protection at the mansion. But then their killing happened so quickly – I was asking ‘who thought THIS was a good move?’ but before I could answer, there was the second wave and Prim was dead and Katniss was down, that it took Katniss voicing it to Gale for me to realise that it was a District 13 move, with Coin taking on subterfuge and using a move Gale had been totally okay with because people on ‘the other side’ are just like wolves. EXCEPT NO and Katniss knew it in District 2 and you let her down. AND PRIM IS GONE.
And the disorientating sense of everything being wrong from there one in – partly because of Katniss’s loss, but partly because victory should not look like Katniss being moved into Snow’s palace, victory should not look like retribution with the oppressors being oppressed, victory should not depend on the mentally and physically harmed (Peeta, Annie and Beattie) to protest for civilisation – although I realised a second after Katniss started demanding terms that she was going to do something about it. That was powerful, especially as, for one last moment, Snow and Katniss were allies.
Of course, the mob would have its justice after Katniss managed hers.
Harrelson almost sold Plutarch foreseeing it all and coming up with something a bit more like democracy (as aided by his Sir Humphrey?) Plutarch was very much pushed to the sidelines after the scene where Coin demanded they sell Katniss plan as ‘theirs’. Of course, the actor’s death puts a specific kind of focus on everything they did with the character.
Shipwise, Katniss/Peeta has long won me over, (sorry THG-watching self), and making him wrestle with reality and the Captiol’s control, not to mention his feelings for Katniss, he got interesting stuff to do and it put massive angsty obstacles to their relationship. It also helped that Katniss was mainly clueless about her own feelings – she should have stopped kissing Gale after part 1, basically. I loved that the guys’ chat ended with ‘well, it’s her choice’ because of course it was. I thought the passionate kiss and the ‘always’ was a little too Hollywood, but they’d gone for that route by bringing Peeta into the Capitol. Also, I liked the fact that she went to his bed in the Victor’s Village, because it was the first time, more than the echo that followed, and I’ve already spoken about the kids. When I say ‘won me over’ I mean in an ‘I approve of you being in a place where you can keep each other alive for a long time, and I have been fascinated by some parts of your journey to that place’ way.
Meanwhile, Effie and Haymitch were so having a thing from the flirting in the last film to ‘Don’t be a stranger’. And onwards, I hope. (I didn’t realise until hearing the part 1 commentary on DVD the other night that the books didn’t bring Effie back. Banks did that all by herself – and probably it being easier to retain a character we’re already invested in than introduce a new one in a film franchise. So that is totally a movie ship.)
I haven’t listed Katniss’s emotional moments – the tired speech that got the man from District 2 not to kill her, the breakdown in the basement after all the deaths. JLaw gave a commanding performance throughout. I think that’s all the big stuff. Some bits were satisfying, then. Others less so, and I think that that’s because the world hadn’t been thought through and I’d been prepared for that. I just needed Katniss to be as okay as possible by the end.
Still I want to celebrate that THG’s been a female-led franchise that has thrown up some really interesting ideas and sometimes sidestepped a lot of the clichés of big blockbusters in our day. I’ve been invested in Katniss’s battle to survive and protect and do the right thing in a horrible world.
As someone who hasn’t read the books, I went into this relatively unspoiled, I mean, I was fairly certain Katniss and Peeta would make it out alive, a little more traumatised, but end up together, and Snow and the Capitol would be overthrown. I’d only seen the one trailer and not even on the big screen, so I hadn’t had a chance to overanalyse it. I have been spending the last couple of weeks rewatching the other films on DVD, leavening it with cheerier stuff.
SUZANNE COLLINS, YOU KILLED PRIM! How could you? Well, that’s what the seat of my emotions says. The rest of me knows it was one of the worst things that could have happened to Katniss – losing Peeta or worse having to kill him by her own hand would have been jostling for the position too. It changed how she saw past and future. And I will give them props for it being clear that Prim actively volunteered to be there, but, but...I was a stunned, angry, quivering wreck for the rest of the movie.
For, of course, the first scene that got something in my eye was Katniss dancing with Prim after having decided she’d leave 13 for the Capitol to execute Snow, and saying goodbye to Prim and Prim sort of reading it on her face. (After a few seconds, my mental commentary was that everyone at the dance should have seen that Katniss Was Up To Something then in the midst of the special effect. It went on too long.) But those two. SESTRAS.
Although the love triangle was important (and I adore that it was as much about what they all believed in and did as their feelings), Katniss’s platonic relationships with so many others, from Haymitch (<3) and the other fellow Victors, to new allies Boggs and Cressida and Pollux were important too, not to mention Snow and Coin.
Family-wise, it broke my heart a little that Katniss’s mother was written out of things after she was first at Katniss’s bedside post Prim’s death. I mean, they’d both lost Prim, which should bring them together, even if Katniss’s mother couldn’t know what else her daughter had been through like Haymitch and Peeta could. I would have traded the cat for Katniss’s mother towards the end at the Victor’s Village. In fact, I quite seriously would – the audience laughed, but I was mainly snarking at how it got from District 13 to 12. Even a dog would have been pushing it, frankly.
Their mother choosing to follow on in Prim’s footsteps and do medical work was but a band-aid, she could have done that after mourning with Katniss. And though I know this is based on YA novels and distancing yourself from you parents is a healthy standard in books for young people, and though her mother wasn’t there for her before, if you don’t prize Katniss’s relationship with her mother after such loss, you rather take the shine off Katniss’s relationship with her epilogue kiddies for me.
Ahem.
I was also aggrieved that they felt that Peeta had to explain that the flowers he was holding were primroses. They’d been so subtle and trusting of the audience with Prim’s death. What other flowers were we meant to think he’d found? Kingsfoil???
Storywise, well, I had lowered expectations, because I don’t think Collins’ worldbuilding (as viewed through the prism of the films) was ever that fully developed. She’d had the lightning strike of the games and the propaganda of the oppressors, but what came outside of that was never as strong. It felt like she must have been relieved when she realised that Katniss’s unit’s final march on the Capitol could work as a sort of 76th Hunger Games – I didn’t feel that we went through the exact same beats as we did in Catching Fire, but I’ll keep an eye out for that when I next see it (more likely to be on DVD than on the big screen). For me, war = the arena was as confusing a parallel as it was a helpful one.
Rewatching part 1, I had been thinking about how the western world is the Capitol, really – it hadn’t been so striking before because I’d been identifying so much with Katniss. I loved her moral struggle in this, how she both was and wasn’t the Mockingjay, the symbol who wanted to be doing something, partly because she was hurting and running, partly because she wanted to help. She became a self-appointed executioner quite early on – very much looking the assassin in her cloak (WHY didn’t she put on some make-up to disguise her face at that point?) even though Katniss doesn’t do stealth.
Jackson (like Coin) had called her a soldier – ha, no, and meant it as a compliment. While it suited Gale, Katniss, no. She had to do this on her own terms. And I liked that Boggs and Patina Miller’s character showed a different side, the professional view of soldiering and that those ethics could not let them accept Coin’s orders unquestioningly. After all, if it’s a war, civilians are different. Katniss knew there were people in the Capitol: Effie, Plutarch, Cressida and her team, the Avoks who weren’t the enemy. Maybe part of the system, not without culpability, even, but not targets.
I loved that we saw so many women in positions of leadership throughout, enough that they were multi-hued.
There was the interplay between being Katniss and being the Mockingjay, and taking the symbol and using it for her own ends, until, for her survival, she had to let the symbol be used by others in their propaganda wars. Ultimately, though, she chose where her arrow was headed. I loved the moment where Haymitch trusted her to have an alternate plan when they agreed to Coin’s no-good plan.
So, we started off with Peeta brainwashed, Katniss without a voice – a recurring theme has been the use of voices, with the singing, the speechifying, the people whose tongues have been cut out, the birds – but slowly regaining it. I did wonder what kind of doctors thought it was right to send Primrose in to see a barely healed Peeta. She was still a kid! And he might be tied down to stop him from being bezerk, but he could still talk and say hateful things about her sister, and she had to talk back and tell him bad things like his family’s deaths – ugh. Maybe it was foreshadowing, for her death, for Coin (as 13’s leader) being willing to sacrifice children, but ugh.
Katniss being made to talk to Peeta then, while it hurt her, was dramatically intriguing. I think a long, hard road where he would have got better would have been more satisfying than siccing him on Katniss and unit in the state he was in and in the terrain they were in, but they just about got away with it by having Boggs put it down to Coin being willing to sacrifice Katniss. (Did Johanna tell Boggs about Katniss’s plan, or was it all part of Katniss thinking she’s being stealthy and everyone else seeing right through her?) Obviously, it added tension, especially after everyone lied for Katniss to keep the hologram and do her mission, undermining Boggs saying she shouldn’t trust ‘them’, which could have meant her unit as much as Coin etc.
Speaking of mental ill-health, where was Annie’s crazy for most of this film? It seemed like her stint in the Capitol had made her all better, unlike Johanna and Peeta. I spent most of their wedding trying to get a better glimpse of what Effie was wearing, although that Finnick had left her to join Katniss’s star unit was heartwarming. And he got a hero’s outing – although Katniss had to do the mercy killing again.
They did a better job on the mutts this time. I bet the briefing was ‘Do better than the first film’ (not a high bar). Showing them leaping out in the dark was more effective, but it all got very confusing until we regressed to everyone having a hero moment (which was how I knew who was still standing). It was no surprise that Gale too would have survived the Games-like scenario, and it was nice that Katniss and Peeta could save each other at this point, but I chortled over Cressida, film director, turning into a gun-wielding survivor. Because I am twisted and inconsistent.
Overall, the character moments were stronger than the action (especially the stuff in darkness), and I think the film knew that.
Sutherland’s Snow was a delight, if you know what I mean. The toast around the table was – well, I expected more than the general to bite it. How Snow felt about Katniss and how ruthless he was and how Sutherland played his dialogue were great.
Coin’s growing ruthlessness was fine, (I didn’t see it developing in Part 1 like they claimed it did in the commentary) and Moore blossomed (in a crowded field, because this was JLaw’s film all day long, Sutherland was brill, Harrelson steals his scenes and we had a pile of relatively complicated supporting characters played by good actors) as the ascending other President.
I loved how things went suddenly all ‘whuh?’ when it had felt like we were following the action movie path of protagonist faces off against antagonist, although the first seed that we were going to be derailed off that track was what I took to be Snow inviting all the civilians to be his protection at the mansion. But then their killing happened so quickly – I was asking ‘who thought THIS was a good move?’ but before I could answer, there was the second wave and Prim was dead and Katniss was down, that it took Katniss voicing it to Gale for me to realise that it was a District 13 move, with Coin taking on subterfuge and using a move Gale had been totally okay with because people on ‘the other side’ are just like wolves. EXCEPT NO and Katniss knew it in District 2 and you let her down. AND PRIM IS GONE.
And the disorientating sense of everything being wrong from there one in – partly because of Katniss’s loss, but partly because victory should not look like Katniss being moved into Snow’s palace, victory should not look like retribution with the oppressors being oppressed, victory should not depend on the mentally and physically harmed (Peeta, Annie and Beattie) to protest for civilisation – although I realised a second after Katniss started demanding terms that she was going to do something about it. That was powerful, especially as, for one last moment, Snow and Katniss were allies.
Of course, the mob would have its justice after Katniss managed hers.
Harrelson almost sold Plutarch foreseeing it all and coming up with something a bit more like democracy (as aided by his Sir Humphrey?) Plutarch was very much pushed to the sidelines after the scene where Coin demanded they sell Katniss plan as ‘theirs’. Of course, the actor’s death puts a specific kind of focus on everything they did with the character.
Shipwise, Katniss/Peeta has long won me over, (sorry THG-watching self), and making him wrestle with reality and the Captiol’s control, not to mention his feelings for Katniss, he got interesting stuff to do and it put massive angsty obstacles to their relationship. It also helped that Katniss was mainly clueless about her own feelings – she should have stopped kissing Gale after part 1, basically. I loved that the guys’ chat ended with ‘well, it’s her choice’ because of course it was. I thought the passionate kiss and the ‘always’ was a little too Hollywood, but they’d gone for that route by bringing Peeta into the Capitol. Also, I liked the fact that she went to his bed in the Victor’s Village, because it was the first time, more than the echo that followed, and I’ve already spoken about the kids. When I say ‘won me over’ I mean in an ‘I approve of you being in a place where you can keep each other alive for a long time, and I have been fascinated by some parts of your journey to that place’ way.
Meanwhile, Effie and Haymitch were so having a thing from the flirting in the last film to ‘Don’t be a stranger’. And onwards, I hope. (I didn’t realise until hearing the part 1 commentary on DVD the other night that the books didn’t bring Effie back. Banks did that all by herself – and probably it being easier to retain a character we’re already invested in than introduce a new one in a film franchise. So that is totally a movie ship.)
I haven’t listed Katniss’s emotional moments – the tired speech that got the man from District 2 not to kill her, the breakdown in the basement after all the deaths. JLaw gave a commanding performance throughout. I think that’s all the big stuff. Some bits were satisfying, then. Others less so, and I think that that’s because the world hadn’t been thought through and I’d been prepared for that. I just needed Katniss to be as okay as possible by the end.
Still I want to celebrate that THG’s been a female-led franchise that has thrown up some really interesting ideas and sometimes sidestepped a lot of the clichés of big blockbusters in our day. I’ve been invested in Katniss’s battle to survive and protect and do the right thing in a horrible world.
