Movie Monday: Mockingjay Part 2

My husband and I (and our sons, too) loved The Hunger Games YA trilogy by Suzanne Collins, her now-famous chilling dystopian series. We watched each movie adaptation: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay Part 1, so we figured we needed to finish it off and watch the final movie, Mockingjay Part 2 (even though it annoys me to no end when Hollywood takes a short novel and turns it into 2 separate movies!). It was a good end to the series...though, of course, the book was better!

If you haven't yet seen or read the beginning of the series, you should go back to those first. Read the books, which are outstanding for teens and adults and very well-written, and then see the movies, which are good adaptations with excellent casting.

So, Mockingjay Part 2 picks up where Mockingjay Part 1 left off: Panem is now at war and Katniss has agreed - reluctantly - to be the face of the revolution, though she still has some misgivings. She and her family and some other familiar characters from earlier movies are safe in District 13 at the start of the movie, but they soon join the fighting in the Capitol. Katniss wants President Snow to pay for all that he has done.

This last part of the story focuses on the war, with a lot of action-packed scenes of battle. It's very well-done, and the special effects are excellent, especially of some of the high-tech forms of warfare that the Capitol unleashes on the rebels. It's been quite a while since I read the books, so there was still some suspense in it for me, as I didn't remember all the details of how it ended.

Of course, as is almost always true, the movie wasn't as good as the book. One thing that was lost in the movie adaptation was Suzanne Collins' very thoughtful and thought-provoking musings (through Katniss) on the nature of war, the price of war, and issues of power and wealth - all topics very relevant to our own world. I described this in detail (no spoilers, though) in my review of the book. The first Mockingjay movie - and to a lesser extent, this one - did show Katniss' moral and ethical struggles to some extent, but it is harder to delve deeply into those kinds of thoughtful issues on the screen than on the page. For me, that was the best part of the book - and the entire trilogy: Collins' thought-provoking commentary on our own world, through the lens of this dystopian world.

But, overall, we enjoyed the movie, and it was a good conclusion to the series. It is action-packed and full of suspense, and Collins is never afraid to kill off significant characters if it makes sense to the plot, so you really don't know what will happen. The cast, including Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, is excellent. We were both glad to have seen the final movie to finish off the series.

All four movies are now available on DVD. You can stream The Hunger Games or Catching Fire for a fee on Amazon (though, oddly, the DVDs are cheaper) and the last two Mockingjay movies are both currently free on Amazon Prime (see links below). All four movies are also available through Netflix (DVDs only).