Film Carew: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

15 November 2014 | 10:33 am | Anthony Carew

J-Law still slays but the latest 'Hunger Games' flick is more team than one-woman-band.

That's the Katniss Everdeen t-shirt shot right there.

That's the Katniss Everdeen t-shirt shot right there.

Che Guevara persists as the most famous revolutionary figure in history not because of his actions, but because he looks great on a t-shirt. Iconography is key in any armed struggle, and so goes the icon of The Hunger Games: Jennifer Lawrence’s arrow-firin’, oft-murderin’, system-thwartin’ teen rebel Katniss Everdeen. A dystopian-state novel trilogy turned into four-film extravaganza, the latest tentpole-picture from this global brand follows the standard current-production-model for cash-cow Hollywood franchises (and/or: AMC prestige television series), dividing its final instalment in twice-the-cash two; Part 1 peaking right when the final-showdown looms into view.

At the opening of Mockingjay - Part 1, Lawrence awakens inside the communist fantasia of District 13, the underground (literally!) dissident society slowly gathering munitions and members, as it builds towards an attempt to overthrow the decadent, wealthy elite in the Capitol. Presided over by Julianne Moore’s preternaturally-calm Madam President, they’re a community kitted out in district-issued jumpsuits; their singular look looking less like a futurist sci-fi’s unitards, more a matching sect of Communist Workers, a Pol Pot-ish parade of top-to-toe drab Charcoal, all collarless shirts and utilitarian uniformity.

Having pulled away the veil of reality-television reality in Catching Fire’s beyond-the-Matrix finale, now Lawrence is ready to bring down Donald Sutherland’s totalitarian/Shakespearean regime. Which means taking her out of that drab worker’s garb, and making her “the best-dressed rebel in history,” kitted out like a super-hero in black pleather and bow-and-arrow; the handsome face of seditious revolution, ready to inspire the oppressed workers of the Districts and perhaps one day end up on a t-shirt.

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"Sisters are doin' it for themselves"

There’s a self-referential scene in which Philip Seymour Hoffman (making more of his role than was written, as ever) plays film-within-the-film director, coaching J-Law through a performance in front of a green-screen; only for its contrivance to falter, our figure-of-resistance turning out to be a bad actor (meta-lulz). So, using vérité as propaganda device, Lawrence and crew of filmmakin' misfits - Natalie Dormer, Wes Chatham, Elden Henson - head out into the smouldering rubble of bombed-out District 12, where our heroine’s hometown has been reduced to a pile of skulls picked at by crows and wild dogs, and into the hell of District 8, where a field hospital is stacked high with corpses and bloodied-and-bandaged extras. And, inspired and enraged by the dispassionate bombing of civilians to maintain the oppressive status-quo, Lawrence suddenly turns into inspired orator, delivering ad-hoc to-camera testimonies loaded with catchphrase potential, singing a worker’s fight-song to stir the hearts of the masses.

Once Lawrence ignites the fires of defiance, Mockingjay - Part 1 effectively becomes a war film, with Moore and Sutherland commanders at the chessboard, trading “moves and counter-moves,” be they by press, propaganda, or missile strike. Director Francis Lawrence, returning after Catching Fire, seizes on the opportunity to go beyond the series’ usual deployments of reality-TV tropes and dystopian-sci-fi standbys, staging a stylish sequence in which a crew of rebels drop-line into an enemy fortress, faces lit up red, descending into the darkness like glow-worms shining a bright scarlet.

During this expertly-edited raid, Lawrence - the Mockingjay herself, titular symbol of the rebellion - isn’t a solder-on-the-ground, but left back home, to fret and worry. If the first Hunger Games was about individual autonomy, a fable in which a young woman held her own fate in her hands, this third film is as much about those moments in which fate is out of her hands. Heroism in cinema is so often individual, but, even as it plasters Lawrence on its posters like Che on a t-shirt, slowly The Hunger Games has moved towards a collective model: Mockingjay - Part 1 about the process of relinquishing one’s own ego, sacrificing the personal to be a part of the communal. It has a genuine weight to it that its predecessors did not, marking the best episode in an increasingly-thoughtful franchise.