Movie Night

Eva and Mark and I just got back from watching MOCKINGJAY part 2, the finale of THE HUNGER GAMES series. Yes, it's still in theatres. Well, theatre. We had to go to Guelph to find a place still screening it. Given its release date (November 20th) and the way a certain space opera has supposedly utterly overwhelmed everything else showing at the cineplex, we expected an empty theatre.

Bzzt. It was packed. If it wasn't sold out, it was damned near. Not an issue for us: all three of us have no problem sitting in front rows. But what a shock.

I was a bit ambivalent about the first HUNGER GAMES movie, before I saw it. I hadn't yet read the books, and it was one of the few times I let a wave of popular culture carry me along. Eva and I very much enjoyed that movie, and the second instalment was even better.

The third was was bad verging on terrible: a blatant example of a Hollywood cash grab. There was no need, no need whatsoever, to split the conclusion of the trilogy into two parts: it turned a tight, lean franchise into a lumbering, plodding gabfest. Still, the charisma of Jennifer Lawrence operated as its own imperative: stick with me, she said to me, and I'll show you a spectacular finale.

Which this...wasn't. Quite.

Maybe it was the umpteen commercials we sat through -- a number that was excessive even by movie theatre standards, and which seemed positively farcical after a steady diet of Netflix. Or maybe it was the fact it was about four in the morning by my personal clock and I'd only slept three or four hours. Maybe I'm too picky: I've read the source material, after all, and I knew what was coming. But something seemed slightly....off about this film.

There were some incredible set pieces: one in a booby-trapped city square and another underground that's going to stay with me for a while. There was a morally nuanced plot that left me in mind of the maxim that war never determines who's right, only who's left. And Lawrence and Hutcherson give their best performances of the series. Still, what really bothered me was the sense of anticlimax -- a ferocious battle cut away at the climactic, pivotal moment to a hospital where the pivot point was explained!--and a multi-segmented epilogue that dragged interminably.  Perhaps the Hunger Games trilogy (it should have been a trilogy!) is a victim of its own success, but I was hoping for more.

And yes, I'll say it.

There's a scene in this movie, lifted almost verbatim from the book, between Katniss' competing love interests, Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson)  and Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth). Peeta asks Gale which one of them Katniss is going to choose, and Gale responds, "that's easy: Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without."

In one sense, of course, that's neither of them. Katniss Everdeen is a remarkably resilient character: if anybody can go it alone in the dystopian world of Panem, she can. But in a much larger sense it's both of them. Peeta was instrumental to her survival in the Hunger Games (though not quite as instrumental as she was to his), and Gale has been caring for her and her family for most of her conscious life. The bomb Gale won't admit to designing that kills Katniss' sister Prim makes the choice much easier for Katniss than it otherwise might have been.

I feel bad for the guy, I really do. He saved about 800 people from his district; he took care of Katniss' family while she was in the Games. He even volunteers at one point to go and save Peeta, which really ought to tell you all you need to know about his love for Katniss. I can't for the life of me think he meant to kill Prim--hell, he saved her and her cat from certain death in a bunker earlier in the series--but war can do some funny things to your moral compass. Things Katniss, of all people, can understand and heal him from.

Point being that Katniss would never have survived without Peeta AND Gale, among many others, and this talk of 'choices'  sounds awfully funny when my wife is watching it flanked by Mark and I.

Just saying.

Anyway, I'm still mulling over the movie in my head, picking nits but also unearthing some real chewy morsels of morality. So I have to say that despite some misgivings, it was a fitting end to a remarkable franchise. At least until the prequels come out. Gotta milk every last drop of money out of people, after all.