Kurt Loder Reviews The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

The new Hunger
Games film might have been a pretty good war movie, if there were
an actual war in it. But there’s not. Suzanne
Collins’Mockingjay, the concluding novel in
her Hunger Games trilogy, tells the story of an
uprising by the citizens of Panem against the tyrannical President
Snow. However, in the manner of the Harry
Potter and Twilight franchises, the
screen version of Collins’ book has been stretched, for purposes of
profit-maximization, into two movies. And so The Hunger
Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 is essentially a
prequel to the presumably more exciting wrapup still to come
in Part 2. Although Mockingjay was
filmed as one long picture, that second installment won’t be
released for another year. So when this movie comes to an end—or
just stops, actually—in the midst of an emotionally fraught scene,
we’re not tantalized so much as simply annoyed, writes Kurt
Loder.

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