The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

After she shattered the Quarter Quell arena, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) wakes up in District 13. This underground district was long thought destroyed, and it now shelters a rebellion against the Capitol. Her home, District 12, has been reduced to ash, and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) has been left behind in the hands of President Snow.

The rebel leadership wants Katniss to become the Mockingjay, the face of the uprising, and to star in propaganda films meant to unite the districts. Katniss is traumatized and does not trust anyone. She has to decide whether she can be the symbol that others need, while the Capitol runs its own broadcasts, starring a strangely changed Peeta.

Francis Lawrence adapts the first half of Suzanne Collins's final novel. He swaps the arena spectacle of the earlier films for a quieter, darker story about media warfare, grief and the high cost of revolution.

The film's main idea is that images are weapons. The series has always been about who controls images and how they are used to control people, and Mockingjay – Part 1 brings that idea into open war. Both the Capitol and District 13 produce propaganda, and Katniss and Peeta are pulled between them in a psychological tug of war.

The film suggests that real feeling is stronger than staged spectacle. Katniss fails when she reads scripted lines. She only becomes powerful when her real rage and grief are caught on camera. Even so, the film never lets the audience forget that this sincerity is still being filmed, edited and used by people with their own political goals.

A critique of both sides: One reading sees the film as a symmetrical critique. District 13 turns Katniss into a product just as coldly as the Capitol turns Peeta into a mouthpiece, which hints that the revolution may copy the tyranny it opposes.

Mockingjay – Part 1 was released in November 2014, when splitting a final book into two films was a common Hollywood strategy. It became a major hit, with the highest opening weekend of 2014 and about $755 million worldwide ($337 million domestic). Its opening was still smaller than those of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

Critics pointed to its smart political subtext: the film treats propaganda, war imagery and media manipulation as its real subject. 'The Hanging Tree' became a pop-culture phenomenon in its own right. It charted on the Billboard Hot 100 and drew comparisons to protest songs such as 'Strange Fruit' and 'We Shall Overcome.' The film also became part of Philip Seymour Hoffman's legacy, as one of his final performances, completed without any CGI recreation.

Audiences and critics praised the strong performances, especially Jennifer Lawrence's, along with the film's smart political subtext and its look behind the scenes of war propaganda. 'The Hanging Tree' sequence became a favorite, and many viewers valued the darker, more psychological tone.

The main criticism was the decision to split the book in two. Many viewers, whether or not they had read the novel, felt the film was incomplete and filled with stretched-out melodrama, with little action compared with the earlier arena films. The IMDb user rating sits at about 6.6.

Overall verdict: a well-acted, thoughtful middle chapter and a major commercial success, generally seen as weaker than Catching Fire because it feels like half a story.