A good set-up to the impending action.

Rating: 6/10 (30 November 2014)

I will admit, I was one among the many of the skeptics who, upon hearing that the third installment of the trilogy had been split into two multiplex sized chunks, heard the tell-tale ka-ching of the cash register going off in my head. It is not an unwarranted fear; there have been prior offenders, Peter Jackson and David Yates coming directly to mind. The same charge could have been leveled at Francis Lawrence had he wasted all the extra sand in his hourglass on maudlin handholding scenes shamelessly geared toward the film's core young female demographic.
As it happens, there is indeed plenty of maudlin to go around in Mockinjay, Part 1, though nothing that left as bad a taste as those five surreal minutes Daniel Radcliff and Emma Watson spent alone in that tent dancing awkwardly to music six decades their senior. That said, there are also just enough scenes to redeem the movie and perhaps even justify the extra hour and half of story, which veers uninhibitedly towards its dystopian roots. We find Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, who has expanded her repertoire from glowering teenager to shivering, emotional wreck) recently rescued from the wreckage of the Quarter Quell to serve Panem's revolution, which in spite of whatever Gill Scott-Heron once said will almost certainly be televised, and with Katniss front and center. Propaganda and its malfeasant uses, after all, are sort of the main underlying themes of Suzanne Collin's books. In the first two installments, we followed in the footsteps of Katniss and fellow tribute Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson), as they were trotted out as show ponies in the Capitol's increasingly desperate attempts to control the masses under their boot heel. Mockingjay finds Katniss handed off to the other team like a football and treated with much the same callow disregard for her underlying humanity. One can forgive Lawrence's character for not noticing; she spends much of the film in what appears to be a permanent state of shell-shock, albeit mostly over the fate of Peeta rather than the horrific genocide of most of her friends and neighbors, which lets face it, starts to get grating rather quickly, especially as the bodies begin to pile up around her fashionably sensible boots.
The emotional claustrophobia is enhanced by the fact that much of the film takes place underground and centers around the propaganda war that has taken nearly as much importance as the actual fighting. Such a story you'd think would set the stage for some spectacular outbursts and tension between Katniss and her new handlers, but instead Lawrence seems content to sleepwalk through the usual motions and pine after her former teammate.
Thankfully, there are points in the film when she and her camera crew are forced to go outside and witness the horrors full hand, and it is in these moments that the story goes from being typical opera to becoming dangerously relevant. In Collin's dyspeptic worldview, the sickening realities of the modern battlefield become yet another theatre production, though whereas the Capitol used our instinct for bloody voyeurism to keep us entertained and compliant, District 13 uses it much the same way Syrian insurgents use YouTube to whip up their supporters and with much the same outcome. The rebels, far from following the heroic cliché of the peasant soldier throwing off an oppressor, quickly become objects of pity in their all-too-willingness to throw themselves lemming-like at forces far better armed simply after watching one of Katniss' videotaped tirades.
The film is good in that sense, but there are still plenty of things that keep it from being really good or great. Despite two installments in which to grow his character, Gale (played by Liam Hemsworth) has not yet progressed beyond having the personality of an AXE commercial, and Josh Hutchison does little better as Peeta, though his character's woodiness can be subscribed too having been held at gunpoint for most of the film. Many of the series' veterans, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Jeffrey Wright, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, retain a respectable but subdued screen presence. They are joined by Julianne Moore playing President Coin, who doesn't quite ooze the same villainy as Donald Sutherland's President Snow (or much of anything else for that matter), though this could simply be because she has yet to take off her mask. For now, she's resigned to holding daily pep rallies and uttering such messianic phrases as "democracy" and "sharing the fruits of our labor" in front of a giant screen, all the while sitting atop a stockpile of missiles, bullets, and thousands of fighting age youths who all dress in the same olive-gray jumpsuits.
Should get interesting, but for now, the film leaves us waiting patiently in the bunker for the real showdown to begin.