Has Hollywood become so reliant on IP that they need prequels centred around the early lives of the villains of their YA movies? Did anyone who watched the original series think “Wow, you know what this series really needs, a 2 1/2 hour movie about Donald Sutherland’s character’s college years.” I understand this is a book that exists. (Was anyone who read the novels clamouring for this story?) But that doesn’t mean you have to turn it into a movie. Honestly, of all the characters in the original series of films, she picked that one? (My understanding is the role was expanded for the movies so it makes even less sense.) If the MCU didn’t exist, this movie would be Exhibit A of blockbuster Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy.

SPOILERS

As with the original series, they’ve gone out and populated this film with good actors which is this thing the best YA movie series do in order to convince you the material isn’t terrible. Whatever the faults of this film, I don’t think it’s the acting.

This is really two movies. The first movie is about our hero’s attempt to help his tribute survive and also help evolve the Hunger Games. One of the many problems with prequels is that the earlier world is often less interesting than the world the original story was set in, and that’s true here. (Of course, in science fiction we often have the opposite problem, where they accidentally do more world-building in the prequel and you have all sorts of things that weren’t in the original, later-set story.) The Hunger Games of this story are in an arena and are generally far less elaborate. I guess, if you were clamouring to learn how they evolved – and a tiny little bit how they were invented – this might satisfy you. But, really, the whole conceit is even less believable now that its pageantry and world have been reduced (for “historical” reasons). If this had been the original conceit of the series, I suspect we wouldn’t be on the fifth movie.

The usual YA tropes are here and if you’re okay with them then they won’t bother you. They drive me crazy, of course, so I was annoyed. But there’s so much extra stuff to get annoyed about in this one. I do not know Zegler and I have no idea if the character is a singer in the novel but the film is at least partially designed to be a showcase for her music career. Yes, you read that correctly. This movie has country music in it! There’s also a fairly ham-fisted attempt to allude, through her (a Colombian-Polish-American actress), to the Gullah, and the African-American origins of country music. Why is that in this movie? I have no idea.

At one point, the rebels blow up the arena and almost kill our hero. (He is slightly saved by Zegler’s character.) But the arena is still usable for the Hunger Games and we aren’t really told how the arena could be damaged so badly but there would still be no easy way out. It’s very odd they don’t bother explaining that. There were a lot of other problems with the first half of the movie but I watched this on a plane over a week ago.

I think if the movie had just been the first story, it would have been a mediocre Hunger Games prequel that nobody but the biggest fans of the series would have wanted. But the second half – an altogether different story grafted onto the first one, with little relation to the Hunger Games as far as I can figure – is where things get truly ridiculous. You see, our hero cheated to save his tribute. The punishment is for him to lose his blue-blood status and be put in an entirely different situation out in the infamous District 12. There we get a very strange world in which the local army/police/whatever are apparently not so despised as to not have to wear face-coverings so they can just literally hang out with the people they oppress after work (and watch country music). This seems…not how life actually is with an occupying army. But anyway…

So Snow does some bad things and these things are supposed to show us his moral transformation from ambitious and sensitive college student to dictator, or whatever. Until his final murder, it really has nothing at all to do with the Hunger Games and it’s a trajectory that should have scuttled anyone’s rise to power. It’s odd that they chose this weird exile thing where he has to betray people instead of him just betraying people in the capital.

What’s odder is that cabin in the woods, which seems like a pretty good place to go live if you don’t like the society. And yet, nobody seems to live there. It’s almost like it couldn’t possibly be real. And I can’t find a reliable map but it seems like north of District 12 is another district and yet they keep talking about escaping north. Who cares?

For me, I think one of the biggest problems is how Snow doesn’t kill Lucy Gray. This feels like a copout meant to make YA readers like Snow a little bit more than they should. This man, after all, presides over this dystopian thing that everyone should hate. (Though I suspect plenty of fans actually like them in theory and dream about winning them because that’s how YA works.) Why give him this out? I think it’s because then the entire movie would be far more depressing. Much easier to kill Dinklage’s character who has been mean to Snow (though for a reason, I guess). It just feels like the kind of writing you find in YA, where the author and the screenwriters don’t think their audience can handle actual tragedy. (Despite, you know, how long tragedy has existed as an art form.)

On another not very important note: DInklage’s character’s claim that he has been trying to sabotage the games rings so hollow. What has he actually done? He helps run them!

Anyway, this movie is unnecessary and it is not good. The Hunger Games itself is better than some YA, certainly better than the other competitor series it spawned, like The Maze Runner and Divergent. But this is one their level or worse. It’s insanely long, it’s two movies instead of one, and I have no idea what it adds to the original story (which I obviously didn’t like).

3/10