THE HUNGER GAMES - MOCKINGJAY PART 1
★★★
General release
Reviewer: Jane Freebury
The story of a teenage girl fighting to save the world as we no longer know it, instead of worrying which of the handsome guys hovering around her is "the one", has emerged as another compelling 21st-century movie phenomenon.
Move over Twilight, there's nothing passive or vaguely insipid about this young woman, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). She's nothing less than the digital poster girl for the revolution.
Katniss and her generation have inherited an awful mess since war annihilated the states of North America. The cataclysm has let a brutish plutocracy take over, that retains its dominance with an annual gladiatorial ritual that compels each state under its control to sacrifice a young man and woman in a fight to the death. Horrifying as it sounds, let's not forget that it's like what the Romans used to do. Like many screen dystopias today, the movie posits two extremes: a highly evolved but utterly morally bankrupt elite versus the desperate, half-starved masses.
The filmmakers have also raided the postmodern icebox for the "look" of totalitarianism. Looming, oppressive interiors of films set in the Third Reich abound and Fritz Lang's Metropolis isn't so far away either.
It's surprising that President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his strategists at the Capitol haven't thought of introducing a fake Katniss to dupe the masses. But then, of course, director Francis Lawrence didn't have a lot of wiggle room in a movie based on the bestsellers by Suzanne Collins that first appeared in 2008.
Like the Roman goddess Diana, with bow and quiver to hand, Katniss is handmaiden of the justice that has been destroyed in the wars. She is also a champion for the democracy that no longer exists, and brimming with righteous anger.
People inside the frame respond to her with the three-fingered salute, a gesture that can get you into trouble in Thailand. Only this week protesters who used it publicly as code for political oppression were, astonishingly, detained.
The series is blessed with the presence of Lawrence whose turns in American Hustle, Winter's Bone and Silver Linings Playbook easily demonstrate that she is one of the best young American actors of her generation.
It was also smart casting to support her with other fine actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson and Sutherland too. But Lawrence accepting roles in so many action blockbusters now means we won't see her best work until she gets the genre out of her system.
