Movie of the Week: Hunger Games, Mockingjay Part Two

[jacey]

I was only half looking forward to this. I enjoyed the first two films (and the first two books), but Mockingjay Part One suffered from being the movie of the first half of the final book in the trilogy, depicting the period where Katniss, suffering from PTSD, has no agency. Frankly her agency is limited for part of this movie, too, until she takes it back in the final moments in an act which is flagged up so heavily that it comes as no surprise,

There's no doubt that the acting is excellent (particularly Jennifer Lawrence, but also the supporting cast) and the cinematography/world-building well realised, but oh how I wish they'd not succumbed to splitting the last book. One movie would have been quite sufficient.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Not seen it but I'm hearing a lot of complaints about misogyny. What's your view?

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I don't know that it's misogyny exactly (certainly not as overt as in Twilight). As I said, Katniss has no agency for much of Mockingjay (the whole book) and when you have a protagonist, male or female, who is not allowed to do much protagging, then you have story structure problems. Katniss i suffering from PTSD and prtobably depression arising from it. Anyone would (male or female) after the events in the first two books/movies.

The PTSD/depression is entirely consistent with what might happen to a character who has just been through a second kill-or-be-killed protracted situation (The Quarter Quell was essentially a second Hunger games scenario when she'd been promised a life of peace for winning the first bout of games.) However it makes for difficult reading in the book and doesn't give the film makers much to go on.

I'm trying to think where the accusations of misogyny might come from, but I'm coming up blank. Of the two villains, one is male, one female. There are some strong women characters (the reporter and even Effie who is a product of her upbringing). It seems to stick pretty close to the book, especially given that they were working around the death of Philip Seymore Hoffman.

I don't think it was a bad adaptation of the book, but I wasn't totally convinced by the book. This is part of what I said in my review of Mockingjay - before the first movie came out.

"This is an uncomfortable book with Katniss struggling to find her way through a moral maze, to keep her loved ones safe and to rehabilitate Peeta after his time in President Snow's mind-laboratories. In the end she does find where she belongs, but it's not what we expected at the outset - but then, life rarely is.

"I won't say I enjoyed this book unreservedly, but I am glad I read it and completed the trilogy. There's a fashion for dystopian YA literature at the moment and this is likely to be fostered by the upcoming Hunger Games movie. I'm not sure I could read too much of it, though as a teen I would have swallowed this whole along with other examples like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (which I also liked immensely). Will it be a bigger fad than sparkly vampires? Only time will tell."