Entertainment Geekly: The book is better.
The book is about why the book is better.
Suzanne Collins’Mockingjayis 398 pages long.
Murray Close
Lionsgate splitMockingjayinto two movies because Lionsgate is a business that wants to make money.
A moment like this:
I’m rising to my feet when a woman throws fire up the door.
She wears a bright turquoise silk robe embroidered with exotic birds.
Murray Close
Her magenta hair’s fluffed up like a cloud and decorated with gilded butterflies.
Grease from the half-eaten sausage she’s holding smears her lipstick.
The expression on her face says she recognizes me.
She opens her mouth to call for help.
Without hesitation, I shoot her through the heart.
That is a sequence you might call cinematic.
Every sentence like an individual shot from a sequence, maybe shot in slow-motion to heighten the tension.
And yet, that scene is nowhere in the nominally cinematicThe Hunger Games: MockingjayPart 2.
What strikes you most of all, when you readMockingjay, is Collins' absolute clarity of purpose.
We are used to endings that stumble, desperate for catharsis, overstuffed with final-act hyperbole.
Collins refuses catharsis, sidesteps hyperbole.
There is an entire war fought inMockingjay, but our lead character experiences it from a distance.
To be fair, Katniss tries to perform heroic acts, with uniformly neutral or negative effects.
It is a beautiful speech.
When she’s done, this happens:
My words hang in the air.
I look to the screen, hoping to see them recording some wave of reconciliation going through the crowd.
Instead I watch myself get shot on television.
“I watch myself get shot on television.”
Jennifer Lawrence never got to play that side of Katniss.
Katniss is a 17-year-old who has lived her whole life under a repressive regime.
But of course, I hate almost everybody now.
Myself more than anyone."
Hopelessness, nihilism, self-loathingall this plus a weird sense of humor.
Heatherswould never get made today.
You hear this all the time.Heathersis a movie about kids killing kids.
It is hilarious.The Hunger Gamesis a movie about kids killing kids.
That first film in the series is dull as a plastic spoon, but that dullness serves a point.
It lets the filmmakers pretend they are treating sensitive material sensitively.
You think that little girl might recognize her.
The movie recreates this scene.
But blood is important.
Certainly, blood is important to Collins.
She mentions it frequently: blood on uniforms, blood on tiles, blood on white mutation skin.
And let’s be clear: Blood onscreen also looks awesome.
But just because it looks awesome doesn’t mean itdoesn’thave a moral point.
I don’t think Collins knew aboutBattle Royalewhen she wroteThe Hunger Games.
It’s not everyone’s job to know about every weird awesome cult work of fiction.
But I bet she would dig the movie.Battle Royalemight actually belessviolent thanMockingjay.
Lights flickering into darkness.
Stone dust choking the air.
Live wires flung free, fires breaking out, rubble making a familiar path a maze.
And that’s the rare sequence without explicit gore.
And there’s that weird wit in that last line: Not dead, but “very dead.”
That paragraph continues:
There’s nothing to do but move forward, killing whoever comes into our path.
Screaming people, bleeding people, dead people everywhere.
We backpedal, hunker down in a stairwell, and squint into the light.
Something’s happening to those illuminated by it.
They’re assaulted by… what?
In less than a minute, everyone’s dead and the glow vanishes.
I grit my teeth and run, leaping over the bodies, feet slipping in the gore.
And Collins makes this sequence exciting, and terrifying.
Is it over the top?
Italics and caps mine:FROM ALL VISIBLE ORIFICES.
I get it, though.
How many filmmakers can create a movie that is simultaneously self-indulgent silly and completely morally serious?
Someone has redone her makeup for the cameras."
George Miller, for sure.
Quentin Tarantino, definitely.
Stanley Kubrick, but that’s like saying Da Vinci could do watercolors.
Paul Verhoeven, although sometimes he’s just indulgent.
Kathryn Bigelow, although her last couple of movies are too serious to realize how silly they are.
Lina Wertmuller, circaSwept Away.
John Frankenheimer, circaManchurian Candidate.
Notably, none of these people directedWater for Elephants.
Mockingjayknows that it’s not the most lighthearted read.
“Frankly, I could use a little sugarcoating,” Katniss says, almost as a throwaway line.
But there are no throwaway moments inMockingjay.
Collins can do the horrors of war, and she can do the hilarity of statecraft during wartime.
The first half ofMockingjaymostly banishes Katniss far away from the frontline.
Coincidentally, lots of people don’t likeMockingjay.
There are many reasons, but these are the ones I hear most often:
1.Mockingjayis boring.
We’re used to endings that satisfy us in the most obvious ways.
Most people want a hero’s actions to have meaning.
Mockingjayknows we all want this.
The TL;DR of this essay is: The book is better.
I know that’s a lame thing to say, obvious, reactionary, Comic Book Guy-ish.
That’s Katniss, throwing shade on the whole ‘shipper concept.
But Collins is too smart for potshots: So much ofMockingjayis actively deconstructing media construction.
Constantly inMockingjay, Katniss is meeting actual rebels, soldiers, people on the frontline.
Many of these people think she is a joke, call her “Mockingjay” as a taunting insult.
Mockingjaycould just be a funny satire of war.
There are lines that seem to come right out ofDr.
But just when you’re ready to laugh, Collins throws in something like the prep team.
Venia, Flavius, and Octavia: supporting-cast avatars of the decadence of the Capitol?
Katniss finds them in District 13, half-naked, bruised, and shackled to the wall.
“The stink of unwashed bodies, stale urine, and infection breaks through the cloud of antiseptic.”
After Katniss frees her prep team, her old pal Gale gets confused.
“Why do you care so much about your prep team?”
he asks, and feel free to overly interpret that he asks that question while literally skinning a rabbit.
Katniss disagrees, but she doesn’t quite know why.
(She admits to us: “I struggle to find a logical position.")
“Maybe it reminds me too much of what happened to you over a turkey!”
This is what’s great about Katniss inMockingjay.
Gale is someone who is absolutely sure he is doing the right thing.
“That seems to be crossing some kind of line,” says Katniss.
“So anything goes?
This is Gale’s perspective, reiterated and forwarded throughout the book.
“So what?”
“We’ll never be able to trust them again.”
Gale has lost just as much as Katniss, but his response is radically different.
She died, of course.
“She was lucky,” Peeta tells them.
“They used too much voltage and her heart stopped right off.”
Her friend Darius wasn’t so lucky: “It took days to finish him off.
Beating, cutting off parts.
They kept asking him questions, but he couldn’t speak, he just made these horrible animal sounds.
They didn’t want information, you know?
They wanted me to see it.”
In entertainment, torture always has a purpose.
In real life: Well,you decide.
InMockingjay, Katniss takes these deaths personally:
They lost their lives because of me.
I add them to my personal list of kills that began in the arena and now includes thousands.
When I look up, I see it has taken Gale differently.
His expression says that there are not enough mountains to crush, enough cities to destroy.
You could justify sending kids into the Hunger Games to prevent the districts from getting out of line.”
I used to hate Gale.
Rereading, I’m struck by how Collins never lets you forget why he becomes what he becomes.
Here is a young boy who has lost everything, has seen his home turned to ash.
Why wouldn’t he want revenge?
But just because Gale is understandable doesn’t make him right.
The plan works; the war ends.
Was it a justifiable act, killing all those kids to save a nation?
How many kids would you kill to end a war?
Gale is the avatar for everyone who lovesMan of Steelbecause it is “tough.”
Gale’s toughness is false, though, his cynicism cheap.
But inMockingjay, all that darkness has a point.
Katniss’ toughness is different from Gale’s: She is a humanist, but it’s hard-won.
She has lost everything, but that experience has only taught her that no one should lose everything.
Compare that to Gale.
(For his sins, he receives a fancy job in District 2.
Every day, he probably passes people on the street who were inside of that mountain refuge.
Is Gale a hero?
There’s a great movie most people have never seen calledI Was Nineteen.
I Was Nineteenwas made under the Soviet regime.
Somehow, it still feels less like propaganda thanThe Hunger Games: MockingjayPart 2.
Question: Do you think it’s okay to hack into the personal files of innocent people?
Related: Do you think women deserve to be paid as much as men?
Their experience was, to put it mildly, utterly terrifying.
“For many of the higher-ups, it’s like it never happened,” one employee told me.
So the hack was bad for people, but it was less bad for rich people.
Lawrence right now an impossibly beloved icon.
Surely it matters when someone like her writes openly about gender-income disparity?
Then again, why do you care about Jennifer Lawrence?
You’ve never met her.
She’ll never meet you.
Do you feel like you know her?
Do you care that you’re wrong?
Is it fair toherthat you’ve made her symbolize something?
Does that make her powerful, or helpless?
Are symbols more important than the people?
Are we just stupid?
There are no answers to these questions.
And there are no easy questions to the whole “ends” and “means” argument.
Mockingjayshould end with the idea that all of that death was worthwhile.
That all these sacrifices were made for the greater good.
They belong to Snow and our deaths do, too.
(Nobody says this in the book.)
In the book and movie, Katniss has only one mission: To kill President Snow.
She speaks to him only once inMockingjay.
Snow’s dominion has fallen; he is a captive in his own home.
Yet he positively jaunty.
He talks about the little bomb parachutes that killed all those children: “So wasteful, so unnecessary.
Anyone could see the game was over by that point.”
He didn’t release those parachutes; District 13 did.
“My failure,” Snow says, “Was being so slow to grasp Coin’s plan…
I wasn’t watching Coin.
I was watching you, Mockingjay.
And you were watching me.
I’m afraid we have both been played for fools.”
Snow makes such an obvious villain, which is why Katniss hates him for most ofMockingjay.
The interesting thing about Coin is that she is an antagonist from Katniss' perspectivebutonlyfrom Katniss' perspective.
To everyone else, she is a wise military leader, a savior-president promising freedom from the Capitol.
But, pointedly, Coin doesn’tjustreinstate the Games.
She lets the Victors put the matter to a vote.
And Katniss more or less casts the deciding votebefore walking outside and shooting President Coin dead.
But the movie tries do everything it can to soften the book’s raw power.
(Movie-Peeta also never gets his leg amputated, because that would be weird and dangerously interesting.)
As one yanks back his head to take the death bite, something bizarre happens.
It’s as if I’m in Finnick, watching images of my life flash by.
Then it’s over.
The movie can’t just let Finnick die for no reason.
He dies heroically, rescuing Katniss; it’s not just three mutts, it’s a few dozen.
This is the dumb hyperbole of Hollywood blockbusters, and also something Plutarch Heavensbee would appreciate.
Look, Liam Hemsworth is a very handsome man.
But Katniss still kills Coin.
I see him bend forward, spewing out his life…” For once,Mockingjaygets to show blood.
(I guess it’s okay when it’s coughing-blood and not gun-blood?
Screw you, MPAA.)
God, I would’ve loved to see Jennifer Lawrence play that.
You miss that Lawrence inThe Hunger Games.
By the end, she looks pretty bored.
Who can blame her?
The book sends Katniss to imprisonment, where she crawls onto bed bleeding from a hundred open scars.
I can make an excellent noose, but there’s nothing to hang myself from.
She tries giving up: not eating, like Bartleby the Scrivener.
She undergoes a withdrawal nightmare, like Ewan McGregor inTrainspotting.
Does she feel happy?
None of this is in the movie.
Which, fine, except the movie also tweaks the foundation of Katniss' final act.
Destroys it, really.
In the book, Haymitch appears, promising to bring Katniss home.
We learn that, while she was held captive, there was a trial.
A curious trial, too: It was “the first big televised event” of post-revolutionary Panem.
Plutarch Heavensbee was both the programmer and the star witness.
“But collective thinking is usually short-lived.
We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.
Maybe this will be it, Katniss… the time it sticks.
Maybe we are witnessing the evolution of the human race.
Think about that.”
Something upbeat would be good.
More importantly:American Idolis back in a few weeks!
Barnum, Robert Armstrong fromKing Kong, and the vain chubby alpha bro played by Craig Bierko onUnREAL.
It is an insane letter, and the worst scene in the entire franchise.
This strikes me as a mind-boggling misreading of the intentions of the book.
On the page, Katniss' strike against Coin is the only action she takes thatisn’tsomehow scripted.
And make no mistake: The movie thinks this is awesome.
It is a way to justify Katniss' not-particularly justifiable actions.
Or is this some greater metaphor for the difference between writing a novel and making a movie?
In the novel, one single woman can make a difference.
In the movie, there’s a dude behind the scenes who pulls all the strings.
I shouldn’t be so harsh, maybe.
The last hour and a half ofMockingjayPart 2really is strong, in a low-fi pulp-action way.
This, in a year when most action sequels trended absurdist, decadent, incoherent.
Oh, Effie.Mockingjaythe book barely makes time for her.
She appears precisely once: “Remarkably unchanged except for the vacant look in her eyes.”
No, she was a rebel all along, and now her and Haymitchwuveach other.
Mockingjaythe book ends happily, I guess you could say.
Katniss isn’t dead, Peeta isn’t dead.
They’re together, they have kids.
How’s this for happy: “One day I’ll have to explain about my nightmares.
Why they won’t ever really go away.”
The last page of the book, folks!
Mockingjay’s ending is better than happy.
This strikes me as one of the most optimistic ideas a person can have.
Not the originalStar Warstrilogy, where the end of an Empire leads to a dance party.
The only comparison, really, isLord of the Rings.
But that’s Hollywood, right?
We’ve gotten so used to treating blockbuster films as engines for interesting ideas.
On Aug. 28, 2011, thefirstHunger Gamestrailer played on MTV.
Three weeks later, the first protestors set up camp in Zuccotti Park.
This is the simple message ofMockingjay: We’re all insane.
And no leader can be trusted.
And every symbol for good is a construct; maybe “goodness” itself is a construct.
Anyone who thinks the ends justify the means is a bad person who may cause great things to happen.
So maybe all we can do is praiseThe Hunger Games: MockingjayPart 2for screwing up as little as possible.
For producing a vision that is helplessly topical and helplessly revolutionary.
Anti-authoritarian, no matter how much it tries to pretend Katniss was working for some higher authority.
Jennifer Lawrence says Katnissinspired her to write that wage gap message.
