Recently rescued from the arena of the 75th Hunger Games and settling down in District 13, Katniss is having trouble adjusting. She’s struggling with the guilt of Peeta being taken by the Capitol and the news that District 12 was destroyed by firebombs, with most of the people she once knew being dead. Being underground doesn’t help either, and the strict militaristic schedule of District 13 isn’t easy to adapt to.
She sees an on-screen interview of Peeta with Caesar Flickerman, where Peeta calls for a ceasefire, angering District 13 citizens, and leading her to agree to be the “Mockingjay”, the head of the rebellion, under the condition that Peeta, Johanna, and Annie will be rescued from the Capitol and pardoned. Katniss then goes on to lead the rebellion in multiple different districts, filming quick propaganda shots along the way and riling up the districts.
I really enjoyed this movie, it shows the reality behind revolution and how much happens in the background to keep it from burning out. I agree with the decision to split Mockingjay into 2 different movies, despite it being just one novel. Mockingjay is such an eventful book that it would be wrong to condense it down into just one movie. I feel like they did a good job at depicting Katniss’s mental issues in this movie. It’s hard to show how she’s feeling in movie format since you’re lacking her direct narration of events, but Francis Lawrence does a good job at showing her PTSD and other mental health issues she deals with over the course of these 2 movies. She has to deal with the trauma of surviving 2 arenas where people are trying to kill her, the guilt of indirectly causing many people’s deaths, and the weight of starting a whole revolution at 16-17 alone. She doesn’t feel like she can talk to anyone about how she is really feeling, and that takes a heavy toll on her mental health throughout this entire series.
It’s also interesting to see how Katniss’s intentions change in this movie; in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, Katniss was just trying to save her and her family’s lives. Yes, she had rebellious actions and beliefs, but they were directly tied to her own safety and wellbeing. In Mockingjay Part 1, however, we see Katniss focusing her actions towards the rebellion as a whole, acknowledging the pain and suffering that all people have endured from the Capitol, and inspiring people to do something about it. It’s ironic to see the person Snow was so afraid of Katniss becoming actually becoming a reality after he tried so hard to prevent it in the last movie.
The movie does a pretty good job at showing the similarities of District 13 and the Capitol. Our first impressions of District 13 are eerie and uncomfortable, mirroring Katniss’ own feelings, and it escalates from there. We watch as Katniss is dolled up for the cameras once again; given elaborate costumes, heavy makeup, and showy weapons. She’s made to perform in propaganda clips, “propos,” Plutarch calls them, to show to the districts and eventually the Capitol. The movie includes all of the similarities to the Capitol, but doesn’t really highlight the comparisons, at least not to the extent of the novel.
The movie also doesn’t fully show how Katniss feels about District 13. In the novel, Katniss does not trust Coin or most of her staff in the slightest. She only agrees to be the face of the revolution to save Peeta and the other victors. There is even a scene in the novel where Katniss finds her old prep team chained to a wall, naked, with a drain on the floor beneath them. It was revealed they had been in there for multiple days, all because one of them stole an extra roll of bread. This really shows the readers how District 13 is not a perfect place with freedom for everyone, and makes the readers lose trust in Coin in the beginning of the book.
Alma Coin is an interesting character, in both the novel and in the movies. Coin is initially introduced as this hero, the leader of the rebellion. Quickly, however, we start to see how she’s not that different from President Snow. Although their similarities are shown more in the next movie, Mockingjay Part 2, they’re still present in this one. We see Coin trying to control Katniss the first time we see her, and she also says that she wanted to rescue Peeta initially since he was a better mouthpiece and probably easier to control as a figurehead. She also has a very tight hold over the people of her district; everybody needs to follow a strict schedule, their food rations are measured very precisely to their nutritional needs, and they are basically trapped underground with very minimal access to the surface.
The ending of this movie revealed some things about Finnick Odair. In an attempt to distract President Snow while District 13 soldiers were rescuing the captive victors, Finnick revealed that he had been sold for his body to people of the Capitol for years. This is very concerning to learn, especially when it was revealed in Catching Fire that Finnick was the youngest victor ever recorded, winning his games at just 14 years old. We don’t know when exactly this forced prostitution of Finnick began, nor the extent of it, but the fact alone reveals to us how deep the corruption in the Capitol is, and makes us wonder how far it goes and how many people are affected by it. We don’t know how many people have also been forced into prostitution in the Capitol, and, although it was briefly mentioned in the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I don’t think that we ever will know the full extent of this disturbing affair.
