Decent but it needed to be completed.

Rating: 7/10 (30 November 2014)

While still a good movie, Mockingjay Part 1 was clearly only a portion of a story and the actual film suffered for it. Everything about the movie was done really well. The special effects and action sequences were top notch and the continually increased budget is evident here especially. The acting was fantastic and the setting was detailed and felt incredibly real. Even all of the little emotional elements delivered perfectly. The real problem is that, as I previously mentioned, it's only half of a story. The movie builds to something that never really occurs and the void in action will be even more obvious when the extreme action in the next film comes to fruition. Yes, I understand that the Lord of the Rings films do something similar. The difference is that those films manage to build towards their individual climax without actually failing to develop the overall story arc. I think Francis Lawrence tried to accomplish that with this film but the source material wasn't made for that to be done, where as the Lord of the Rings movies were. Mockingjay Part 1 is still a good film and ultimately will be incredibly important in setting the stage for what should be the best film of the franchise but it is still incomplete.