Mockingjay: Part 1

Get ready for more dead children.

"The courage of one will change the world."

Hello all, welcome back to the Tagline! Today is finally that magic day, the day I will be reviewing the Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1:The Almost End: Subtitles Forever. No but seriously what the fuck we get it, maybe consider a bit more of concise of a title? At any rate, Mockingjay picks up right after the conclusion of Catching Fire (check out my thoughts on that one over here) with Katniss coming around inside a bunker beneath the bombed out ruins of District 13. Naturally the first thing she does is freak out, because she recalls that during the final fateful moments of the Quarter Quell, Peeta was left behind, as the District 13 rebels extracted Katniss, who is valuable to them above all others as a symbol and inciter of revolution. Katniss of course is a wreck of human being, having been now in not one but two hunger games, and separated from the only person that allowed her to hold herself together through it all. That said, the leader of District 13, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore in one of her less insane recent roles, I mean compared to Carrie's crazy mom for instance) doesn't have time for any of that nonsense, and so together with Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, this movie together with its part 2 were his final performances) and so go to considerable lengths to motivate Katniss.

Everyone's just playing to try and be king of the castle.

I have to mention before I get too deep into my post about this movie, that I did not like the Mockingjay book at all. I was in fact furious when I finished reading it, maybe angrier than I'd ever been upon finishing a book. It would be accurate to say that I didn't really care for the book is what I mean. That being said, a lot of the things I disliked about the book did not happen in the parts that are covered by this film (which only covers up until about maybe 2/3 of the way through the book). So where was I? Right, Coin and Plutarch enlist the help of Effie Trinket and some emotionally motivating drawings from her late fashion designer Cinna (you know) to get Katniss into the game. As a condition she demands that Peeta be a priority for rescue, and that he not be held accountable for any actions he might be forced to take by the Capitol. Coin grudgingly accepts, and then after that it's revolution time.

What a creep am I right? Not Katniss, Snow, obviously.

Katniss takes to the field, rather than staying in safety and shooting stock propaganda (because as we know she is an absolutely terrible actress, unlike Jennifer Lawrence) and she is accompanied by Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and a team of camera people, led by Margaery Tyrell (I mean you know Natalie Dormer, her name is Cressida in this movie) As you might guess, even as the opening act to a movie about a violent uprising there are a lot of explosions, a lot of gunfire, and a lot of dead and dying people. The movie opens up with horrific displays of violence and human loss, and it maintains that cheery tone for the duration. President Snow (Donald Sutherland) is forced into a corner by the increasing rebellion, and reacts the way you'd expect a monster to, by torturing his prisoners, and blowing up hospitals and shit.

Because really, who needs guns when you have exploding arrows.

The movie is more or less what I've come to expect based on the first two. It's appropriately darker than even the first two, and it doesn't suffer from the middle child syndrome that Catching Fire did, so in general I found the movie to be a bit better than the last (though I think as a stand alone concept that the first movie is the best). Unlike some other movie series that broke their last book into two parts, this movie has more than enough material to cover two full movies worth of action (unlike Breaking Dawn, which questionably has enough for ONE movie) and it has a logical stopping point (unlike Deathly Hallows, which has a kind of awkward stopping point) so I was left with a gut-wrenching stopping off point. Overall it was a really excellent penultimate chapter in the Hunger Games series of films, and I am really upset that they are waiting a full year to release the second half. I was also really upset that they played a Lorde song over the credits, but I guess nothing can be done about that either.

That's it for now! Join me again on Thursday, when I explore the magical world of the New York City sewer system.