The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2

Alternate Title:  Hunger Overtime

One sentence synopsis:     Katniss Everdeen and her band of freedom fighters take the civil war to the Capitol itself in an attempt to bring down President Snow once and for all.


Things Havoc liked: Some of you may recall that I was not terribly complementary towards the first "part" of Hunger Games' Mockingjay, due entirely to the baffling creative decision (unless you consider the box office possibilities) to arbitrarily divide it in half. The track record for movies that have done this is very poor, even if you don't consider Twilight (and who does?), but I didn't chide the filmmakers because I hated Mockingjay, I chided them because Hunger Games is the only YA series of films that I like, and I wanted it to remain good as it approached its ordained end. In the time since then, we have experienced the pacing disaster that was the third Hobbit film, a film whose flaws were also due to badly-designed cuts between films that should never have been separated, but what's done is done, and no matter what my feelings on dividing movies up into halves or thirds or whatnot, I felt it was important to see the series out, and find out if anything could be salvaged from the mess.

The strength of Hunger Games has always been its cast and its characters, a collection of weird individuals in a larger-than-life world derived from the bastard child of Imperial Rome and Madison Avenue. Jennifer Lawrence has long-since ceased to require this series to prove that she is a good actress, but she inhabits the character as well as she ever did. Katniss by now is a weary, tired soldier, sick to death of war and the losses it forces on her circle of friends and loved ones, animated primarily by the abiding need to take revenge against President Snow, and protect whatever she has left. Snow himself is as delightfully sociopathic as ever, and Donald Sutherland's avuncular evil gets a full stage to work with here, as the rebels advance relentlessly on his glittering Capital, and he is permitted to chew a bit more scenery than the previous films afforded. Even in the face of impending defeat, his Coriolanus Snow (I love these names) is unrepentantly evil in the best tradition of theatrical Bond Villains everywhere, and I'm so glad the film finally saw fit to give him a stage to monologue upon. The role of Peeta remains the only thing I've ever been able to tolerate Josh Hutcherson in, and this time the film gives him a little more to do than simply stand around moping as part of one of the obligatory love triangles that all YA stories must be provided with. Following his capture and rescue from the hands of the Capital forces, Peeta is a badly-damaged individual, conditioned and re-conditioned to the point where he has admitted difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy. The film actually handles this concept reasonably well, particularly given the comedic or overwrought method that any sort of Mental Illness is usually portrayed on screen.

Indeed, there's a couple of pretty decent ideas at the core of this film, particularly in terms of the scale of the piece. The war between Snow and his rebellious districts is in full rage by now, with tens of thousands of troops engaging one another in battles so immense as to dwarf the protagonists. One gets a fine sense of them being more or less lost in the wider war, as Katniss' efforts to get to Snow seem almost incidental compared to the wider sweep of the conflict around them. Normally I'm not fond of movies that miss the forest for the trees (it was one of the big problems with Spielberg's War of the Worlds), but in this case the trees are more interesting than the forest anyway. Sam Claflin, Jena Malone, Woody Harrelson, and Jeffrey Wright all resume their roles from earlier films, necessarily small, but welcome, while the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in his last theatrical appearance, reprises arch-manipulator and gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee. Given Hoffman's untimely death, the filmmakers plainly did the best they could with his remaining footage, contriving to put a role together for him that mostly doesn't feel pulled together artificially. Considering the circumstances, I'm forgiving of any seems that result.

Things Havoc disliked: I'm considerably less forgiving of everything else.

My original concern with Mockingjay being split in half was not simply that this sort of thing never works (which it doesn't), but that the first film in this pairing was entirely comprised of setup and character establishment, neither of which are bad things to have in a movie, but which meant that there was no actual payoff to anything. Nothing of consequence happened, no battles were fought or issues settled, there was not even any interesting action, resulting in a movie that was flat out boring at points. At the time, I assumed that, given everything, we were being set up for a second part that would be almost entirely paceless action, all of the "boring" setup parts having been gotten out of the way earlier, akin to what happened to Harry Potter 7 or The Hobbit. The good news is that it turns out I was entirely wrong. The bad news is that the reason I was wrong is that this movie is also nothing but setup and character establishment.

Mockingjay 2, or whatever we're calling it at this point, is a dreary, boring, leaden affair, a movie that has some of the worst pacing I've seen in quite some time, whether you consider it its own film or part of a unified whole with its predecessor. It is a film that consists almost entirely of the main cast sitting around in basements, bunkers, or other dark holes in the ground, talking in hushed, whispered tone to one another about how horrible things are, something I would normally be more forgiving of if the movie had focused on those horrible things and the ugly reality of war. That theme is in the film, don't get me wrong, but takes a second place to the love triangle built up between Peeta, Gale (Liam Helmsworth at his least memorable), and Katniss. This element, a staple of YA fiction, was in all of the previous movies I'm sad to say, but in the previous movies there were other elements to distract us with. Here there are not. The strange, decadent, world of Panem, both alien and familiar, is barely here, partly due to the understandable reason that the Capital is in the middle of a brutal street-to-street civil war, but that hardly excuses relegating characters such as Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman or Elizabeth Banks' Effie to barely a minute of screentime, characters which were the mainstay of my level of interest in the previous films. Here was an opportunity to watch the Capital's degenerate society collapse upon itself in the midst of violent, fiery upheval, to watch characters we've come to know get pressed to their breaking point, and all the filmmakers can think to do is show us mopey people walking through ruins and worrying about which interchangeable boring hearthrob will wind up with Jennifer Lawrence? Even the action scenes, which while not the draw of the previous films, were at least there, are muted and boring this time around. There is one, one action sequence worth remembering, a standout piece that starts in sewage tunnels inhabited by demons straight out of the later versions of Doom, and escalates from there. This one sequence however takes place hours before the end of the movie, and doesn't even serve as a climax to anything, being buttressed on both sides by yet further scenes of the characters sitting in basements engaging in long, pregnant gazes at one another.

But no, let's be fair, there's more than just moping and love triangles going on here. There's also some of the most ham-fisted "political" drama I've seen in a while.Julianne Moore  is not exactly my favorite actress in the world, and long-time readers may recall my identification of her character as being a designated bad guy designed to teach lessons about the abuse of power in the next movie. I don't want to give the game away, but let's just say that a character who shows up, apropos of nothing, and announces that all elections are suspended until further notice, and that the first thing that the rebels should do following the defeat of the capital is to put on a new set of Hunger Games, may not be quite as subtle as the filmmakers intend. What justification the filmmakers have in tearing all of the interesting parts of this setting out and replacing them with a Juliette Lewis performance that would not be out of place in Escape from LA, I have no idea, but it seems to be part and parcel with this film's utter lack of ambition, content, and elements of interest.

Final thoughts:  With Mockingjay Part 2, The Hunger Games, a series I once enjoyed enough that I gave its second installment a place on my yearly top-10 list of best films, ends not with a Bang, but with a Whimper. If nothing else, it proves, assuming anyone didn't already know, that arbitrarily hacking a book up into two components is, and will remain, a terrible idea, one done purely for the sake of squeezing more money out of a franchise that has proven popular enough to be squeezed. I can't say I didn't see this coming, but I do admit a sense of profound disappointment with the end of the series. Movie franchises often end this way, everything from Terminator to Alien to the terrifying collapse of the Matrix series showed me as much, but this film hurts more than most, if only because it didn't have to be like this. Hunger Games was a special franchise, one of the only series of its genre that I could stomach at all. If the filmmakers had only concentrated on making an actual movie instead of deadening all possible forward motion with a blatant cash grab, then we might well have had something special. Instead, all we have now is the lurching remains of a series I once admired, and the epitaph of a once-promising series to remind us that there exists no story in the world so simple or idiotproof that someone in Hollywood can't be found to fuck it all up.

Final Score:  4/10

Next Time:  The Interview, Take 2.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

Alternate Title:  Downtime

One sentence synopsis:    Katniss Everdeen must become a symbol of rebellion to stoke the flames of revolution against the Capitol and save her friends from the previous games.


Things Havoc liked:  I loved Catching Fire, the second installment of the Hunger Games series, itself a rebuttal to the overwhelming evidence on-offer that YA books make terrible movies. The series has been uniformly good to-date, but the second movie was a masterpiece, a deserved entry on last year's list of best films. Accordingly, unlike a lot of the stuff I have been seeing recently, I was stoked to see this, one of two yearly-installment films (the other being The upcoming Hobbit) that I thought had potential to really nail the end of this remarkable year down. The reason that this series is so good is fairly simple, quality of actors, quality of writing, quality of production, one of the only films in the genre that actually seems to take itself seriously. Compare this series to the Mortal Instruments or Divergent or, God help you, Twilight, and the differences are apparent. As with children's films, YA movies work best when you don't treat them as YA, but simply as another movie on another topic, something Hunger Games has consistently done, and the other series have consistently not.

But enough background, we're here to talk about the movie itself. And to a degree that's actually rather surprising, the movie itself is, of all things, a character study, primarily of our main character, Katness Everdeen, played as always by Jennifer Lawrence. I'm an unashamed fan of Lawrence's, and this is the role that introduced her to me in the first place, so when I tell you all that she is excellent here, I don't expect I'll be astonishing anyone. The movie dives into Katness' character far more than the other films were able to, as she tries to recover from the terrible ordeal of having competed in two consecutive Hunger Games, the second one designed specifically to destroy her, and struggles with becoming the face of the incipient revolution being prepared against President Coriolanus Snow (I love these goddamn names), played by Donald Sutherland at his most avuncularly-villainous. The movie doesn't drive completely into a study of PTSD, but that aspect is there, something I had sort of hoped would be in the previous films, but better late than never. Indeed, the film takes a fair amount of time just looking at Katness as a character, as she tries to figure out what she should do in response to the escalating violence and reciprocity of the Capital's forces. Wisely, the movie doesn't try to recast Katness as a shattered violet or anything, but you cannot engage in child murder (or war) for terribly long before some psychological effects manifest themselves, and Lawrence rides the line properly to give us a character we can believe.

But even Lawrence has nothing on the late, great, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, playing Plutarch Heavensbee, the gamesmaster-turned-propagandist whose task it is to produce the speeches, videos, films, posters, and other materials that will drive the revolution forward. Hoffman is fantastic here, as an expert in his field finally being allowed to put his skills to use, utterly unapologetic about the nature of his work (propaganda), and refusing to allow himself to be used as a stand-in for a moralizing lesson about the purity of truth or some such. In a similar vein, and only slightly less impressive, is Elizabeth Banks, whose character of Effie Trinket was more or less a ludicrous joke in the first two films, and here is... well a slightly less-ludicrous one. Kidnapped by the rebels and brought to a far more down-to-earth area than the wild world of Panem, she, like Hoffman's character, becomes an assistant of sorts using what skills she does have, presentation, erudition, even makeup. The two of them are stellar in this film, the former liberated, the latter constrained, both accustomed to being the smartest people in the room (only one of them correctly), and both acidly doing what they have to do in order to practice their art. And that art is interesting to watch, particularly given the discovery, early on in the film that Katniss is a terrible actress, whose propaganda films consequently look flat and terrible, forcing innovative (and perhaps a bit contrived) solutions in order to produce the material necessary.

And there's other performances here worth watching as well. Jeffrey Wright (of Casino Royale and Only Lovers Left Alive) reprises Beetee, a Q-like gadgeteer who at the very least turns in one of the better "super-scientist" performances I've seen, insofar as his science actually manages to walk the tightrope between understandable and innovative. Catching Fire's Sam Claflin has a smaller role this time, but does a decent job with it, playing a different tribute liberated from the games with a different set of baggage on him from his experience in Panem. Josh Hutcherson, playing Peeta (once more the only role of his I've ever been able to stomach), actually turns in the best performance of the three movie for him, limited though his role is. Even Liam Hemsworth, Thor's younger brother, who was more or less useless in every movie prior to this, has a decent enough turn this time. If all you're after is watching these actors play these characters for a while, then this movie will provide that much.

Things Havoc disliked:  But nothing more.

Let's address the elephant in the room here. Like the last Twilight and Harry Potter movies, this film is split in two, and what we are watching here is the first half of a movie, a decision that ruined those films (not that Twilight needed the help), and comes damn close to ruining this one. There is a flow to movies, a narrative arc that comes with telling a proper story, and while it is certainly permissible to violate that flow for whatever reason, it is not going to work to arbitrarily cut a film in half just to make more money. There is no climax to this movie, no denouement, no sense of rising action, nothing. We wander, purposelessly, from scene to unconnected scene, without any sense of tension or setup or establishment for purpose. If the second half of the movie were to immediately follow this one, then perhaps this wouldn't be a problem, but we won't know if that's the case for another full year, and the film that we have before us is consequently incomplete. At no time during the two hours it runs could I determine how close we were to the end of the film, nor, when the movie came to an end, had I the first hint that the end was coming. Maybe there was too much material for one movie or something, I don't know, but for whatever other faults they had, the Hobbit movies, also carved into pieces from a single book, managed to produce complete films out of the material, even with the sudden abruptness of the second film's ending (an ending I actually thought was kind of brilliant, as opposed to this one).

But whether or not there was too much material here for one film, there is plainly not enough for two, as this movie is padded as all hell. Sequences exist for no reason that I can fathom except to take up time, such as an interminable bombing sequence focusing around a cat, and an even more interminable speech delivered by a propagandist that takes four times longer than it should by virtue of cutaways and Shatnerian-acting. Even the action scenes, and they are very few, take forever, as characters have to stare at military bombers for three full minutes from five different angles before they work out that they may be engaged in bombing. This tendency is so pronounced that despite all the nice performances on offer, the movie is simply boring in a lot of places, and that's the one thing you cannot afford to have your blockbuster YA action film be.

But set the pacing aside and the money-grabs by the producer, and there's still major problems here, most of which have to do with new additions to the cast. Catching Fire introduced a bunch of new characters, all of whom were nuanced and interesting and had objectives they kept hidden which might have had nothing to do with Katniss at all. This time though, we get Natalie Dormer, of the Tudors and Game of Thrones, playing Cressida, a director escaped from the capital, whose job is to follow Katniss around and film her. I wouldn't mind this concept so much if this character was given a character of her own, or even an opinion on something, or for that matter, if Dorner could act worth a damn, which she cannot. A whole gaggle of fellow idiots tags along with her, of such little use that I refuse to even research their names. But worse yet is Julianne Moore, an actress I have never liked, not even in movies I favor (Big Lebowski for instance, or Children of Men). This is more or less the reason why. Her character of President (of the rebels) Coin is a complete cypher, reciting deliberately ambiguous speeches awkwardly about inevitable victory or some such, a transparent attempt by the filmmakers to add "mystery" to the character that winds up all but attaching flags and sirens to itself saying "EVIL CHARACTER DESIGNATED TO TEACH LESSONS ABOUT THE DANGERS OF REVOLUTIONS IN THE NEXT MOVIE".

Oh, I'm sorry, am I spoiling things? I have no idea, I never read the books. I just have a feeling...

Final thoughts:   Mockingjay, or rather Mockingjay's first half is a tremendously disappointing film, mostly due to the terrible decision to split it in two. Not only does this guarantee that the first movie is a boring exposition-fest intercut with shots of the camera watching a character watch the beauty of the trees or whatnot, but it also all but guarantees that the second half of the film, due to come out next year, will likely be nothing but a single, solid action piece, without time to stop for exposition, character, or breath. All things being equal, that might not be so bad, and God only knows what the whole thing will look like when arranged front to back, but given that this is the movie I was given, this is the result I have to report on. The movie is not a bad film, neither poorly-made nor poorly-acted (on the whole), but if there was ever proof that a good movie is more than the sum of its parts, it's this one. Why they did not decide to simply make two complete movies out of Mockingjay, I do not know, but they did not, deciding instead to simply cleave one large movie in half with an axe.

I still like this series, despite this misstep, and will in all likelihood see the last element of the film when it comes out at the end of 2015. But do not expect me to give it mercy for failing to properly establish itself just because the establishment, and strictly nothing else, was all done in the previous film.

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Week:   Actors in Nebraska.  Lots of them.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Alternate Title:  The Evil Overlord List

One sentence synopsis:  Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark must compete in a champions league edition of the Hunger Games, even as the flames of rebellion begin to spread across the land.

Things Havoc liked:  Last year's Hunger Games was a complete surprise to me, to the rest of the viewing public, and probably to the film's distributors, who chose to dump it in the middle of the Doldrums like a known bomb. Rather than the would-be Twilight ripoff that many (including me) were expecting, Hunger Games was a flawed but fundamentally strong film, one that inserted a breath of fresh air into the YA film market, and left me at least anticipating the sequel with something akin to optimism. While I'm as aware as any of how dangerous unfettered optimism can be when walking into a new film, there are occasions when hope is rewarded, and it is my pleasure to report that Catching Fire, a film that is superior to its predecessor in largely every respect, is one such occasion.

A year has passed since Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) vanquished all opposition in the 74th Hunger Games, and against all odds, both survived to return home. In that year, conditions in their Appalachian (I assume) home have deteriorated from bad to worse, with ever-more brutal acts of repression from the central authorities. Their families cared for by virtue of their status as victors, Katness and Peeta are forced to play along with the cover story from the previous movie of being star-crossed lovers, despite the increasing brittleness of the lie in question and of Panem's control over its impoverished provinces. The film wisely takes its time establishing the tense circumstances that Panem finds itself in, in order to properly give weight to the decision by the central government to pull together a special edition of the Games starring only previous winners. The complex subtleties of the central authority's control, from broadcast propaganda to calculated brutality are explored in detail, as well as the thinking behind the arbitrary-seeming decisions concerning the games themselves and the traps and designs that go into them. What emerges is a picture of a real society, built upon the basis of what was established in the previous film, but granted this time a patina of verisimilitude as we begin to understand just what makes Panem tick.

It feels like I've spent pages and pages of these reviews praising Jennifer Lawrence, but once more isn't going to kill me. Her performance in the last film was very good, and this one is simply better, an older and more embittered Katniss than the girl we saw in the last film, whose capacity to tolerate the horrific atrocities she witnesses around her as she is forced to go on tour for the central authorities and recite sterile speeches and propaganda to enmiserated serfs being crushed under the same oppression that placed her in the previous games. Her relationships with everyone from Peeta to Haymich (Woody Harrelson) to the rest of her competitors to the evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland) to her still-wonderfully campy stylist Effie (Elizabeth Banks) is everywhere more complex, more mature, more real than it was in the previous film, and yet never feels random. She plays everything from desperate fear to boiling anger to contemptuous professionalism with an ease that actresses thrice her age would struggle to adopt, and absolutely inhabits Katniss from start to finish. Yet the big surprise to me was that, unlike the last movie, the same can be said of Josh Hutcherson's Peeta, previously a pining boy-next-door type whose role was effectively to play damsel in distress for Katniss, now a seasoned killer in his own right, who still carries the torch for Katniss, but never in the cheesy, mopey, teenage-angst way that so many movies do. Hutcherson doesn't so much amp up his performance as deepen it, never pushy, never insistent, never given to raging tirades about why someone doesn't love him, simply trying to ensure that he and Katniss survive yet another horrific ordeal. I've never cared for Hutcherson, not as a child actor nor as an adult, but he is miles better this time round, and acquits himself in excellent company with aplomb.

And what company it is. The most interesting elements of the previous Hunger Games were the decadent and fascinating world of Panem, a world I felt we did not get enough time with, and which was filled with interesting characters portrayed by excellent actors. All of them (save for the occasional casualty) return in this film, and are joined by newcomers such as Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Plutarch Heavensbee (those names!), gamemaster for the special edition of the Hunger Games. Hoffman and I are not always on the best of terms, but this is a case where his signature understated performance is spot-on. The character is no shrieking maniac, nor a pastiche of evil, rubbing his hands together over the glories of wickedness, but a master manipulator, psychological and calculating as he seemingly effortlessly prepares the "moves and countermoves" that are the tools of his trade. Recognizing the fundamental immorality of his profession, he alone in Panem seems to disdain the vain decadence of the society around him even as he exploits it ruthlessly to political ends.

But by far, the most refreshing addition to this top-notch cast is not Hoffman nor any other member of Panem elite, but the group of returning, veteran Tributes that Katniss and Peeta are pitted against. So easy it would have been for this film to turn into a repetition of its sequel, as Katniss is forced to kill a fresh crop of "designated evil" Tributes in reverse order of total screentime, but rather than do this, the film turns itself to the question of just who the rest of these people are, and what they might think of being dragged out of a comfortable retirement to massacre one another at the behest of President Snow. All of these characters, from the Capitol-pretty-boy-turned-ally Finnick (Snow White's Sam Claflin) to the fiery and vicious (and extremely bitter) Johanna (Suckerpunch's Jena Malone), to the mad scientist-turned-contestant Beetee (Casino Royale's Jeffery Wright). In every case, the movie establishes the sort of character (hulking brute, evil sexpot vamp, bitter nerd) that we've seen in dozens of these movies before, and then pulls the rug out from under them by giving them complex motives, goals, and character points that we are allowed only to glimpse, as the simple premise of the Hunger Games is twisted on its head by the boiling stew of character machinations that the movie has unleashed.

With a budget twice the size of the original film (something that's prone to happen when your first installment makes three quarters of a billion), much of the pacing and cinematographic issues, such as they were, in the first movie are absent here. No more shakeycam, no more hyper-frenetic action required to soften the fact that we were (then) watching kids killing kids, just a well-shot, gorgeously-vibrant movie, from the cold, sterile landscapes of District 12's slag mounds, to the glittering, degenerate capital city of Panem, to a weird, crater-like tropical bowl complete with inland sea that serves as the setting for the Games themselves. As before, we spend a fair amount of time within the game arena (which I suppose is only to be expected), but unlike last time, when I had issues with that fact, this time there's actually plot and character development occurring within the Games themselves, giving us an actual reason to be there other than the mechanical act of watching 22 opponents be reduced to none. As such my complaints about the time spent therein, ones predicated on the notion that Panem was inherently more interesting than the Games themselves, no longer applies.

Things Havoc disliked:  There do remain a few sticking points I wasn't overly keen on. Liam Hemsworth (brother of Thor) plays Gale Hawthorne, the love interest (?) of Katniss when she's not pretending to be madly in love with Peeta. His role would appear to be important, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it was, as he mostly serves to occasionally complain to Katniss about the fact that she's required to pretend to be madly in love with Peeta. I understand the situation is awkward, but the reasons for this charade are perfectly obvious to literally everyone else in the movie, including the villains, and other than this complaint, he basically here takes over Peeta's role as designated whipping boy who must be saved by Katniss whenever convenient for the plot. I suppose he was in the book, but in the film his character just comes across as being placed on ice, revealed to remind us who he is until he actually gets to do something in movie three.

There is, also, the ending to the film, which I will try not to spoil, but like Ender's Game before it (although to a much lesser degree) feels inordinately rushed. I don't mind it when a movie sets up its sequel, and such behavior is almost mandatory for the second part of a trilogy nowadays (thank you Star Wars), but the establishment of this sequel takes place in less than a couple of minutes, and in what might as well be voiceover narration, as a character we've barely seen appears and explains sudden and tremendous plot revelations to our main characters, revelations it would have been far more interesting to actually see. The revelations themselves aren't the problem, as they make sense given everything and establish the premise for the next film well. But film, as always, is a visual medium, and these things don't have the required weight when we're sitting in a room just talking to one another about the terrible events that have occurred.

Final thoughts:   In case I somehow haven't been clear, Catching Fire is a superb film, from beginning to (nearly) end, one that surpasses the achievements of its predecessor with effortless grace, giving us more of the things we enjoyed from the original and replacing all of the things we did not. YA fare like Twilight, The Host, or next year's Deviation remain anathema to me, yet the Hunger Games is the exception that proves the rule, a film so rich in character and premise and plot and story as to render all such comparisons obsolete. Despite having been caught off-guard by the original's release date and subject matter, I was once more caught off guard for the sequel, this time by the sheer quality of storytelling and filmmaking on offer, and with the year nearly over, I unhesitatingly pronounce it one of the finest movies I've seen all year.

After the first Hunger Games, my desire to see another film was founded on my curiosity as to whether lightning could strike twice. After the second, my desire to see the third is based on the fact that with a movie this good, all I can ask for is more.

Final Score:  8/10

Ender's Game

Alternate Title:  Better with Kinect

One sentence synopsis:  Boy-genius Ender Wiggin trains at a futuristic battle school to become the commander of Earth's war against an alien species.

 
A Note Before we Begin:  What a hornet's nest this film turned out to be, so tied up in the politics surrounding Orson Scott Card that it's become borderline impossible to speak of it as a film. Two different people informed me that they would not read my reviews any longer if I so much as went to see this movie, irrespective of the score I gave it. While I certainly have no sympathy for Card's politics, this absolutist rejection is a line of thought I find uncomfortably akin to those who threw books onto bonfires because their authors were liberals or Jews, and lest any lingering firebrands remain, I saw this movie without reference to Card's homophobia, and will be reviewing it as such. If this policy is not to your liking, there are plenty of other reviewers to follow.

Things Havoc liked:  The more I think about Enders' Game, the more I wonder if it wasn't intended as a sequel to Independence Day, and re-purposed partway through with the book in mind. See if the concept sounds familiar to you: 30 years after defeating a massive alien battlefleet which nearly annihilated the planet and destroyed many major cities, the humans have harvested alien technology and constructed a unified government and military capable of visiting the war back on the aliens themselves. In the flashback scene at the beginning of the film, we watch as the hero of the previous war flies his lone jet fighter up into the center of a massive alien mothership, striking its weak point and destroying it and the surrounding fighters in a single, cataclysmic blow. It was enough that I sat there wondering if this mystery pilot informed the aliens that he was "baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack".

When one wishes to make a film, be it sci-fi extravaganza or historical manners piece, one could do worse than to start by assembling a cast of actors whom I have enjoyed in many movies previously, and offer to present them to me. It is in this spirit that Ender's Game stars Harrison Ford, who finally breaks his recent streak of phoning it in, playing Colonel Graff, the commander of Earth's defense forces, who has been assigned, for reasons never made entirely clear, to recruit children and teenagers for training as potential commanders of the space force assigned to fight the war against the aliens. Ford's character is a pragmatist first and foremost, employing his customary gravelly, seen-everything voice, defending his choices as he plays psychological games to draw out the inner fighters and sociopaths of his would-be trainees. Assisting him in this endeavor are Ben Kingsley, playing Mazer Rackham (?), a part-Maori tactical trainer who ruthlessly molds the best candidates into the necessary killers, and Viola Davis as Gwen Anderson, the psychological expert in charge of monitoring the social dynamics of the kids so as to identify those possessing the best traits. All of these people do excellent jobs in roles that should frankly be ludicrously silly, bearing in mind the entire time that there are consequences to inaction, even as they debate the whens, hows, and whyfors. As the adults in the room, they are the ones charged with lending the film a patina of "realness", and do so very well.

But of course this film is not about the adults, but the kids, led by Hugo's star, Asa Butterfield, as the titular Ender Wiggin (where do they get these names?), a boy recruited into "battle school" and gradually molded over the course of the film into someone's ideal of the perfect commander. Though I'm not entirely certain what accent he was aiming at (and I'm not certain he was either), Butterfield actually does very well here, as he did in the aforementioned Hugo, playing a kid trying to deal with almost unfathomable pressure applied steadily to him since birth to conquer, win, and be the best. He manages to show the ruthless and innocent sides of Ender's character (mostly) without the need for showy emotional scenes, and holds his own against Ford and his former co-star Kingsley effortlessly. Alongside him is Hailee Steinfeld, of True Grit (my first ever review!), whose performance, while nowhere near the standout of the aforementioned film, still complements Butterfield's exceptionally well, displaying the effortless confidence that particularly smart teenagers seem to possess (or at least fake) in limitless quantities. The majority of the other kids, played by various actors I've understandably never heard of, are just as good, whether their roles are antagonistic, supporting, or a mixture of both.

It's no surprise anymore when a blockbuster comes replete with excellent effects, but Ender's Game's manage to be noteworthy nonetheless. Alien designs are weird enough and appropriately insectoid, while the space stations appear sufficiently strangely-shaped to be believable. Battle sequences are crisp and involve at least a nod to physics, in that spaceships shatter rather than explode when struck by munitions, and the movie even uses the fact that smashed wreckage in outer space carries momentum and mass as a plot point during one of the more hectic fights. Earlier sequences involving zero-G laser-tag fights employ accurate physics, often used for tactical gain, and the film wisely tends to assume that the audience will be able to figure the physics out intuitively and thus spares us the lesson in Newtonian mechanics. In the cinematography department, the film is shot with unusual sharpness, by what technique I do not know, which enables the viewer to see every imperfection and blemish on every actor's face. I can only assume was a stylistic decision to help humanize characters who are not generally allowed showy scenes of hyper-emotion.

Things Havoc disliked:  The plot of Ender's Game is something one simply has to accept as a base premise. Even the movie appears to state as much, brushing aside the question of just why children are being thrown into command of battlefleets with a quick explanation of reaction times and openness to new ideas, or some such. I'm willing to meet a film halfway, and can therefore accept the premise, but no such excuse offers itself in defense of the writing. Dialog is wooden and stiff from beginning to end, not because of exposition dumps (of which there are many, but which are handled reasonably well), but simply because the characters, child or adult, speak like nobody in history has ever spoken. If one character responds to massive pressure with monotone robot-like utterances, I can understand it, but not when the entire cast acts like they're auditioning for Robocop. Things get worse when the characters are supposed to act relaxed. The actors convey much through expression and vocal tone, but when they open their mouths to talk, its like someone dubbed a completely different set of words in. Director Gavin Hood is also credited as the screenplay writer of this film, and judging by the result, they might have done better to just let Orson Scott Card take over the duties in question, as he at least managed to create a popular book out of the concept unladen by such problems.

But the dialog, stiff though it is, pales in comparison to the major problem of the film, the pacing. Butterfield's last film, Hugo, had massive pacing problems, resulting in a first half that was entirely superfluous to everything. This film not only repeats the same mistake (what was the point of all that laser tag, really?), but compounds the matter by being forced to cram all the rest of the film into what feels like the last twenty minutes of its sub-two-hour run time. As a result, the actual events of the Command School training (which are of considerable importance, given everything), the war itself, and its aftermath, are treated like a cliffs notes version of the actual book, rushed through in such haste that it actually opens plot holes that would otherwise not be there. Is it reasonable to assume, for instance, that tens of thousands of humans could build and inhabit a major military base for twenty-seven years without once exploring a highly visible cave located literally a hundred yards outside the main entrance? A little bit of breathing room would have allowed the film to establish elements like this properly, without giving us the impression that the film was trying to hustle us out the door without thinking things through. Worse yet, this compression means that Kingsley's character, as well as the climactic war that Ender has supposedly been training for, occupy barely a third of the film's runtime (if that). Blockbusters are routinely 2-3 hours nowadays, why was this film forced down into such a restrictive timeslot? And knowing that it was going to be, why would the director not choose to concentrate on the elements that were of the most importance, as opposed to the third consecutive "dealing with a bully who doesn't like him" sequence that Ender is subjected to?

Final thoughts:   Even without considering the politics of its author, Ender's Game is a hard movie to sum up properly. The acting is good, and the film easily comprehensible, despite the literal rocket science it is laden with, and yet the basics of writing and storyboarding are all so wrong as to make one question whether or not some calamity overcame the project mid-production, necessitating unforeseen and clunky changes to the script. I genuinely like both Butterfield and Steinfeld, to say nothing of veterans Kingsley and Ford, but the movie's flaws are such that it's largely irrelevant how well they do their jobs. By no means was Ender's Game an unpleasant movie to sit through (clunky though the dialog did get, especially at the beginning), but I would not expect it to find its way into anyone's catalogue of treasured classics. As such, without getting into the question of whether Orson Scott Card is an unfairly maligned genius or a homophobic reactionary misanthrope, the film of its own volition merits, in my mind, a conclusion that very few of the partisans surrounding its debate will be willing to consider, that of mediocrity.

Not every movie is worthy of the rapturous hagiographies or thunderous denunciations that come with scores on the narrow ends of the bell curve, guys. Some films, despite all the outrage and fire, just don't manage to stand out at all.

Final Score:  5.5/10

The Hunger Games

Alternate Title:  Battle Royale with Cheese


One sentence synopsis:  A teenaged girl from a poor region must fight 23 other teenagers to the death for the pleasure of an oppressive government.



Things Havoc liked:  Jennifer Lawrence is fast becoming one of my favorite actresses. After an incredible performance in Winters' Bone (which garnered her an oscar), and another amazing one in X-men First Class (where she actually made me give a damn about Mystique), Lawrence here plays the title role of Katniss Everdeen, a teenager in what I assume to be Appalachia who volunteers for the Battle-Royale-esque Hunger Games to spare her younger sister. The movie rests entirely on her shoulders, more or less, and she carries it off with her. Despite being 21 and playing 16, she looks the part and acts the part, helped by the fact that her character clearly has had to grow up very fast in a dystopian, poverty-stricken world that appears to have regressed to the early 1900s. She's not a "designated action star", but when she fights people or shoots them with a bow, we believe it's her doing it, and the movie wisely never makes her do anything that breaks our suspension of disbelief.

The rest of the cast meets her highly-set standard quite handily. Stanley Tucci turns in a hilarious (and vaguely disturbing) role as a talk show host, and Woody Harrelson is hilarious as a former victor of the Hunger Games assigned to whip Katniss into shape. Donald Sutherland, playing the obligatory Donald Sutherland role of the President of the Sovereign Evil People's Evil Republic of Evil, brings his usual grandfatherly charm to a role that is actually fairly menacing, Elizabeth Banks plays an out-of-touch frilly shill with such verve that I was actually impressed, and none other than Lenny Kravitz manages a decent turn as Katniss' 'image' consultant for the all-important sponsorships that accompany the games. Finally, Lawrence (and Katniss') co-star is Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, whom I've literally never seen in anything good, but who actually breaks the trend here. He plays a normal kid selected for this insane competition, who has no chance of winning and knows it, but does largely whatever he has to in order to just make it through.

The movie is hardly subtle in its gradations of the world. Katniss and her people are dirt-poor coal miners from what I assume to be Appalachia, while the citizens of the Capital district (somewhere in the Rockies, I believe) look like a cross between Studio 54 and Versailles. The names of the District 12ers are either plants or traditional rural names (Primrose, Haymitch, Gale) while those of the Capital denizens are Roman (Cinna, Seneca, Coriolanus, Cato, Caesar). There's a very much bread-and-circuses feel attributed to the Capital (its' very name is "Panem"), with characters who witness or even participate in these somewhat monstrous events not from cruelty but from simple ignorance and decadence. It's not what I'd call nuanced, but it does the job.

Despite the trailers, action is not really the focus of this film, and yet when it does happen, the action is decent enough. Much of it is shot in faded-sound, a mechanic I'm seeing more and more of and hope doesn't become overused, with strategic shakes of the camera or blurring effects (this is how you're supposed to use shaky-cam, guys) to mute the violent fact that we're watching kids killing kids. Nobody transforms into a superman at any point, and when people get hurt, it freaking hurts, even if the healing salve that the characters apply several times does seem a bit too effective. Much of the movie is spent simply with tracking, maneuvering, walking, or hiding in the forest, which I suppose is reasonable enough. Were I trapped in a wooded arena wherein 24 people were meant to fight to the death, I'd probably lay low and wait for the numbers to come down too.



Things Havoc disliked: I hate to sound like a teenager, but this movie could really have used more action. I don't mind a cerebral film, nor one that eschews kung fu in a case like this, but the vast majority of the action in this film takes place off-screen, a decision I suspect was made to earn the film a PG-13 rating. It's not that I want Katniss to brutally murder more people, but the film is supposed to be about the brutalization of children and the attempt to hold onto common decency in a setting like this, and allowing Katniss to get away almost clean (which it does) renders that drama inert. There is a sequence where she pairs up with a much younger girl who saves her from a swarm of mutated hornets (don't ask), and who appears to look to her as a protector, and the entire time the audience is left thinking that, by the rules of the game, these two are going to be forced to kill each other. The movie (of course) sidesteps the question, but in doing so, robs the material of the drama that it inherently possesses. The only people Katniss ever actually has to kill are 'designated bad kids' who are generally in the immediate process of doing evil, which results in the film softballing its own hard, brutal premise.

On a slightly less metaphysical note though, the movie is quite long (almost two and a half hours), and while I didn't feel that was too much, I did feel that it didn't make good use of its time. More time spent with the weird and interesting society of Panem would have been nice, as opposed to yet another hike through the woods. Don't get me wrong, I know the Games themselves are the focus here, but we can only watch shots of people staring apprehensively at the trees for so long before we begin to get bored. The strange, facile, decadent world of Panem is so well-crafted that I was left wanting to see more from it, to find out if the majority of its citizens are evil, ignorant, or simply (and most interestingly) have a set of social morals that is simply alien to our own. It would also have been nice to establish some of the other contestants better. Gestures are made in the direction that the other kids, even the "evil" other kids, are just kids who are doing what they feel they have to in a situation that terrifies them all out of their wits. More of that would have aided the dramatic weight of the film more than the fourth shot of Katniss tying herself to the top of a tree to sleep.



Final thoughts:   Based on a YA trilogy of books (unread by me), the Hunger Games seems to have done well enough at the Box Office to merit sequels, and I can't say I disagree with that judgment based on the quality of the film. While I would have liked to see more of certain elements and less of others, the film itself is well-structured, acted, and shot, and Lawrence is a very believable and likeable heroine (even if her Appalachian accent is about as pronounced as my own). Though I wasn't as rapturous about it as some people I've talked to, I did quite like this film, and I would be interested in seeing where the series goes next. In an age where YA books have spawned such movie series as Twilight, I suppose one should count one's blessings.

Final Score:  7/10