70% on Rotten Tomatoes
After my last exam on Friday in the blistering 40 degree heat, I was sooooo excited to watch this! My love for Jennifer Lawrence and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy is no stranger to anyone, and the film did not disappoint!
The film opens up right where it left us at the end of Part 1, and continues on the war between the Rebels and the Capitol. We see that District 13 is attempting to rally and unify the other districts to gather enough force to take down the Capitol. Without the unification of all districts, theirs is a helpless cause.
There is inherently going to be a problem with splitting up a book into two films. The first film of course had it's slow moments, but I guess I didn't really notice them. Similarly, I saw reviews of this film arguing that the pacing did not really work out well, as there were moments that dragged on for quite a while. To be honest, I didn't notice the pacing issues in this film AT ALL. With the first film I could see where non-book-readers would start to get bored, but I've been trying to think back about the film and see what pacing issues it had. Maybe it's because I'm biased with my love for Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and the trilogy itself, but I think the pacing was fine.
While the ending to this trilogy is not as epic as endings to other franchises (there's no big boss fight or anything), it did a fantastic job at sticking to the storyline, mainly only changing things for the sake of keeping the total run time down to 2 hours and 17 minutes. Another thing I love about the storyline is that it shows you the reality of war. I have a feeling I talked about this in my review on Part 1 and when I reviewed the novel, but the film does a great job at showing you the consequences of war. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is very real, and Katniss suffers from in it Part 1. In this film, there's even more about the effects of being a POW especially with the Capitol's instruments of torture. There's also the idea that war is brutal; not everyone is going to live, and if they do live, do they get to live a good life?
The action in this film is pretty great; they had some really good scenes and it brought you back to the action and arena-styled fighting in the first two movies.
Jennifer Lawrence's acting was also great in this, she kept it real and grounded in the character of Katniss and it was completely believable. Liam Hemsworth's acting was alright too, nothing special, but I think Josh Hutcherson did a pretty great job as the broken Peeta.
A few downsides to this film were that I wasn't too sure if non-book-readers would be able to understand some of the stuff that was happening or being said. I don't think they did a very good job at taking into consideration the non-readers in the audience, and I would have liked for them to explain or go into a bit more detail for certain things. Another thing is that Johanna Mason is my favourite character, and I love Jena Malone's portrayal of her. She has a much bigger role in the novels, but unfortunately I guess for timing purposes they had to cut her section out. Whenever she was on the screen though, Jena Malone stole the show, I just wish we could have seen more from her.
So overall, I think this was a satisfying end to the series. I'm not going to say it was epic, because as I said before, the whole reason for an ending like this is to show you that sometimes when wars end they aren't completely epic; I'm not going to say it was happy, because it does show you the reality of war and it's kind of bittersweet rather than happy; and I'm not going to say it was amazing/great/whatever because I still think Catching Fire was the best film of the series.
A few side notes:
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