Catching Fire had set the stage perfectly. I remember when I reviewed the previous installment I had said it set the series ablaze and I couldn’t have put it better. The future was brimming with possibilities – so much intensity and focus, a clear direction, thrilling action, a climactic finale….Well, while we are still one movie away from the finale to comment on that, Mockingjay Part 1 in itself is sadly quite the dampener and douses most, if not all the flames that catching fire had set.
The primary reason that this movie fails is not because it isn’t particularly well made or its badly acted – it fails because, quite simply, it doesn’t deserve to be an entire movie by itself. By these counts, only the Harry Potter franchise really deserved a two part finale – there was so much Rowling had done with the last book that a single movie, albeit action packed, couldn’t have done justice. But that’s where it ends. No other franchise deserved it. All this hobbit 3 part movie nonsense is also possibly going to meet the same fate.
In all honesty, I haven’t read the book Mockingjay, but if this movie is any indication, its plain it doesn’t have all that much to showcase. It would be obvious to even the most casual viewer – each scene lingers on more than its due; if Katniss is moping about something, well she mopes longer, if the ground is being surveyed after damage, you see more of the rubble, if Katniss is to sing a song, the song will be longer – each time you know its just to fill time – it really doesn’t have any impact to make.
Despite the seemingly comfortable 123 minutes it runs, Mockingjay Part 1 is painfully slow. There’s hardly anything that happens. I could write a two line summary of the movie and I may well have told you all that happens by it. With not much happening, neither does Jennifer Lawrence need to do too much with her character and unfortunately, in the few scenes that do demand something, she doesn’t pull it off as convincingly. Julianne Moore is a veteran actress and its sad to see her given such a wooden and one dimensional character. All the other side characters are also given even lesser airtime so I really don’t get what the point of this movie was.
Since I haven’t read the book, I don’t know whether the Hunger Games is really going to have the thrilling end we would’ve anticipated at the close of Catching Fire. But if Mockingjay Part 1 is to be any indication – I am not all that enthusiastic about its release, despite it being the finale of the series. That’s the kind of damage this ridiculous, money spinning focused strategy has done to what might well have been a good trilogy
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