Mockingjay Part 2 Movie Review

After accepting her role as the Mockingjay, Katniss Everdeen, along with her team, prepares to take their fight straight to the ruthless Capitol. While her mission is to bring President Snow down once and for all, Katniss finds that her squad dies at the hands of either Mutts, Peacekeepers or both. Once in the Capitol, Katniss discovers that there is another threat rising that could decide not only her fate but the future of all Panem.^[1]

I loved this movie. It was packed with action, and there is a lot to go over. The books go even more in-depth, and I’m scared of how long that review is going to be whenever I get around to typing that out. Mockingjay Part 2 is a very good movie that shows the struggle of revolution, while highlighting the non-ideal aspects of war and how it affects everybody, not just the parties involved .Peeta is a very good example of this; he had nothing to do with the rebel plan in the arena, yet he was the one most affected by it. The whole time he was in the arena, his goal was to save Katniss, and he, along with Katniss, had no idea of any rebel plan until after it was over. Even though he had no rebel agenda, he was still captured and tortured by the Capitol, along with Johanna and Annie. In the books, they give slightly more details about the torture methods that they endured, but in the movies, we know close to nothing; all we were told is that Peeta’s memories of Katniss had been altered with Tracker Jacker venom to turn Katniss into some type of Capitol mutt in his eyes.

This affects Katniss heavily; throughout the last movie, Mockingjay Part 1, Katniss had been feeling extreme guilt over Peeta being captured by the Capitol. It got worse when she realized that Snow was using Peeta to punish Katniss, which led to Peeta being rescued and Katniss learning of his torture and “hijacking”. Her learning that Peeta now saw her as a mutt from the Capitol made her mental health much worse; she tries to shut Peeta out, and refuses to think of him like she once did. She can’t handle the fact that the Peeta she once knew is gone, and tries to immerse herself in the rebellion and killing Snow, effectively distancing herself from Peeta, at least until Coin sends Peeta to the Capitol to join the Star Squad.

While in the Capitol, Peeta is very unstable. He is nowhere near ready to be out of the hospital, but Coin knows this. She purposely sent him to Katniss with the knowledge that he was dangerous, in hopes that he would kill Katniss, who is dangerous to Coin in the fact that she would not throw support to her if an election were to happen after the revolution. Boggs explains this to Katniss in the Capitol, warning her that she might need to kill Peeta if the time comes to it. This conversation helps to build tension against Katniss and Coin, which is brought up again multiple times throughout the movie and is a main plot point in the end.

Peeta, despite the hopes of Coin, does not kill Katniss. He does have an episode after Boggs’ death, in the chaos after a pod was detonated, in which he attacks Katniss and kills a different squad member, but that was the only time he lost control, and it was somewhat justified. Overall, Peeta seems to be doing well in the Capitol; the squad helps him to sort out what’s real and not real, and he’s trying to figure out what his relationship with Katniss was before he was hijacked. After he watches a video recording of him killing one of the squad members in a rage—one that he does not remember—he tells them that he needs them to kill him because he is dangerous. This reinforced the idea to us that Peeta has not turned into some bloodthirsty killer, and that he does not want more people to get hurt by him. You can still see how, even though Peeta is never going to be the same person he was before he was tortured, he still has his selfless personality.

Alma Coin is a very interesting character in the last 2 movies. I’ve already talked about her actions in Mockingjay, Part 1, so I’m just going to be covering her in Mockingjay, Part 2. In this movie, we see how controlling Coin really is, and how much she tries to manipulate every situation in her favor. Coin refuses Katniss’ request to go to the Capitol after she was shot in the chest, and Katniss ignores her refusal and sneaks onto a cargo ship on its way to the Capitol. After Coin gets knowledge of this, she spins it in her favor by telling Plutarch to make it into their idea, and she begins to write Katniss off as a martyr before she even dies. Katniss has already been of use to Coin; she’s rallied the districts to the point of revolution, and she is seen by the districts as this symbol who has survived so much that the only thing that would be of use to Coin now is if she died. If Katniss survives this revolution, she, while probably not wanting to run for president herself, would probably not give her support to Coin, which would influence the people of the districts to not vote for her. Coin, in turn, sends Peeta to them in hopes of increasing the chance that Katniss will not survive this “last battle” of the rebellion.

Directly after getting the news that Katniss had “died” in the Capitol, she intercepts Snow’s message to the people of Panem to give grievances to Katniss and to establish her identity as a martyr. She has this incredibly emotional speech ready, which is interesting because Katniss had only been labeled as dead for a few minutes. This shows the audience that Coin was ready for the announcement of Katniss’ death and was practically expecting it with how eager she was to use her death as a rally cry.

After Katniss is revealed to be alive, and the Capitol is taken by the rebels, Coin changes her approach. She can’t use Katniss as a martyr, and can’t control what she does or what she stands for anymore, not that she really could in the first place. She doesn’t seem to be worried by this, at least not in front of Katniss directly. In a meeting with all of the surviving victors, a total of 7, announces her idea of hosting a “Honorary Hunger Games” with Capitol children. This sick idea gets 4 out of 7 votes, 2 of which are from Katniss and Haymitch. At first, we don’t understand the reasoning behind this decision to support Coin’s idea, but that is revealed to us in the next couple of minutes, when Katniss is about to assassinate President Snow, and shoots Coin instead. Coin, while not being as directly evil as Snow, is still one side of the same coin (you see what I did there lol). They are both okay with lying to their people, manipulating situations to benefit them, killing out of “necessity”, and are both just trying to hold onto power in any way that they can.

Katniss is held in a jail cell until being pardoned back to District 12. In the movie, it’s not really shown, but in the book, Katniss is held in that jail for weeks on end, getting fed and medicated daily. She goes a little insane in the cell, but we get some interesting moments in her mind. The books as a whole show so much of Katniss in her mind, which is severely lacking in the movies and takes away so much from the story. After returning to the Victors Village in District 12, one of the only surviving structures in the whole District, she encounters Buttercup, Prim’s cat. She breaks down and throws things at the cat out of grief for her sister, but eventually she takes Buttercup in. Eventually, Peeta returns to 12, and the epilogue shows us them living together with 2 kids.

So many shows and movies show the female main character with children at the end to show their growth. It’s a very common ending, and is usually just used to push motherhood onto women. The Hunger Games uses this ending differently, however. While the Hunger Games movie does not include this, in the book, Katniss and Gale talk about having children. Gale says he would have children if they lived somewhere else, but Katniss replies to him, saying that they don’t live somewhere else; they live in Panem. Somewhere where your kids can be picked up and dropped into an arena to fight to the death. Katniss is against having children throughout the whole series. She believes that there is no reason to even consider having kids because of where they live. Katniss having kids at the end of the series concludes it in such a powerful way, showing how her whole mindset has changed from the first book, along with the country around her. It shows how she finally feels safe enough to have children without the threat of starvation or the Capitol. She has always been a motherly figure to others in the book; from parenting Primrose when her mother was unable, to watching over Rue in the arena, Katniss has always been protective of others and willing to sacrifice herself for the people she loves most.

Something that I believe could have been established better was the whole Katniss-Gale-Peeta love triangle that is going on. Although I believe that the “love triangle” is more than just teenage drama, this movie didn’t do a whole lot to flesh it out. In the books, Gale is initially seen as more of a sibling to Katniss than a potential lover; it was even referenced in Catching Fire how someone started the rumor that Katniss and Gale were cousins after camera crews interviewed Katniss’ family in District 12. Katniss met Gale when she was 14, after both their dads died in the same mine explosion and Katniss had to start hunting in the woods to eat. Their dynamic was platonic up until Catching Fire, when it was revealed that Gale had romantic feelings for Katniss, and Katniss, reasonably, had a lot larger issues to deal with than teenage romance and did not make any advancements on Gale.

Even with Peeta in The Hunger Games, Katniss never saw him as a potential romantic interest. Throughout the whole first novel and movie, Katniss was under the impression that Peeta was making up the entire “I’ve been in love with you since we were kids” motto for the cameras, and she was doing the same. It was only revealed to her on the train back to District 12 at the end of the first movie that Peeta was serious, but she did nothing to reciprocate his feelings, leading to the tense relationship you see them having in the beginning of Catching Fire.

Throughout the whole series so far, Katniss has been far too preoccupied to worry about her potential romantic interest. Even as a child, she has always been in “survival mode”, only giving her attention to things like feeding her family and keeping them healthy. She has never had time to think about who she would like to be with, and it has never been important for her. In Mockingjay, however, that topic is more relevant. The people of Panem are actually interested in what Katniss’ romantic life is going to be like; Plutarch even mentions presenting Gale as Katniss’ lover, which Katniss automatically turns down. She doesn’t see the importance of her romantic interest when people are dying.

The Katniss-Gale-Peeta love triangle as a whole represents more than just Katniss’ romantic interest; it represents what Katniss needs in her life after the revolution ends. Throughout this whole series, Gale has been characterized as hot-headed, ambitious, and ready for action, a lot similar to Katniss. This is important to keep a revolution going, with the “fire” of the revolution being Katniss’ arrow into the force field in the 75^th games. Fire, however, is not always the best thing to have. Throughout both Mockingjay movies, we see many horrors of war: death, famine, torture, loss, etc. We see how much this war affects people’s entire lives, and how desensitized so many people are to it. Gale is especially categorized in this way, with him actively dehumanizing the enemy, even if they’re just sweeping the floor for them. This is shown most heavily in the way he helped design a particular bomb, one that would have a delayed explosion to draw in more people. This exact bomb is used in one of the last scenes of this movie to show how the destruction and devastation of war can harm anyone when it kills the one person Katniss has been trying to save since the first scene of the first movie: Primrose Everdeen. The betrayal Katniss feels after this, even though Gale did not intend for Prim to get hurt, leads Katniss to cut Gale out of her life.

Katniss does not need any more fire in her; she has enough of that. What she really needs to live on is peace. Peeta’s warmth and kindness are what she really needs to live on and grow. Peeta, despite being heavily traumatized and unstable, has this gentle quality that Katniss lacks, and is what she needs to complement her. That is what the ending of this movie symbolizes; it symbolizes the necessity of peace and gentleness after the horrors of war; the light at the end of the tunnel; the calm after the storm.

1. Blazer346, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. Directed by Francis Lawrence, IMDb, IMDb.com, 2015, imdb.com. Accessed 9 June 2026.