Book vs. Movie - The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1
By Ben Gruchow
July 2, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Hunger Games series
The Hunger Games series are about the nation of Panem (which has grown out of the ashes of North America following catastrophic events), its 12 “districts”, each specializing in the production of a valuable resource; their creation of a grisly, televised fight to the death between children called the Hunger Games, and a growing rebellion against the Capitol’s tyranny. The first book introduces us to 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, both of District 12. Katniss will become our protagonist and a central figure in the rebellion.
Mockingjay (Part 1)
In the immediate aftermath of the 75th Hunger Games and the total destruction of her district, Katniss finds herself in District 13, which was previously only hinted at and is thought to be a wasteland by the other twelve districts. During the Dark Days, the Capitol and District 13 arrived at an impasse, with weapons of mass destruction pointed at each other with the rest of the country in the middle. The Capitol privately agreed to let District 13 divorce itself from Panem’s rule, provided that they stand down. The aboveground structures were bombed, and District 13 was thought to be wiped out of existence. With Katniss’ status as an icon of a growing rebellion, District 13 (headed by its President, Alma Coin) seeks to take down the Capitol by turning the other districts to their side. In the meantime, residents of the district have strict regimens as far as diet, activity, and work, and all resources are rigidly conserved. It’s into this environment that the surviving residents of District 12 find themselves, along with the defecting Capitol citizens who are joining the rebellion.
The Book
In broad strokes, Mockingjay 1 is about motivation and control, and bringing the two into balance through will. District 13, with its daily regimen and concrete-bunker environment (going outside is a luxury), represents the essence of control; President Coin is a little-seen figure who maintains absolute neutrality and pragmatism, and under her governance, the district operates like a well-oiled machine. She heads up the rebellion, but lacks a motivating factor for it. That motivating factor is meant to be Katniss - an individual with motivation, but no control. She has an all-consuming desire to rescue Peeta Mellark (taken by the Capitol) and to kill President Snow (head of the Capitol and the series’ primary antagonist). However, she has no concrete plan for accomplishing these things; her stability and sanity suffer for it.
Mockingjay 1, thus, has an unfortunate but necessary duty to discharge: Having been through two Games (with all of the attendant packaging and trivialization by the Capitol’s media and citizens), having been repeatedly threatened with harm against her family, her district, and herself by a party that has every resource and political reason to make good on those threats, we must now observe the cost in some detail. Katniss spends most of Mockingjay 1 in a disaffected daze, to the degree where she barely resembles the protagonist we’re familiar with. The book goes to sufficient lengths to document behavior that would be appropriate for a trauma victim, and the early going is therefore a little nebulous; we haven’t been exposed to the meat of the book’s story yet, and so we’re largely watching a damaged 17-year-old girl - one who has been depicted thus far with a good amount of willfulness and strength - attempt to hide from the world.
The story begins to focus on remaking Katniss into the Mockingjay, and the campaign is a failure: she’s placed into a studio environment for the making of propaganda films, coached on what to say, what to do. She is not much of an actor. This is consistent with the character, who has never been particularly good at pretending to be someone she’s not. There is an event midway through this story that takes the conflict (and the antagonist) from an abstraction into a horrific and tangible reality. With cameras present, she is able to react emotionally, unscripted, in a way that funnels her motivation into something that can be controlled (footage that can be edited and broadcast, in this case). This is not, however, a “hero moment”: the character of Katniss does not suddenly have control, only an increased and more tangible motivation for revenge. It’s up to her campaign handlers to control it in an effective way.
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely either read or seen Mockingjay 1, and it will not come as much of a surprise that her motivation is eventually manipulated by Snow as readily as it was by the rebellion (chiefly by airing interviews with Peeta where he appears progressively skeletal and abused), intended to dismantle her rather than rally the districts. That Katniss realizes this (during a period of shelter following an aerial attack by the Capitol on the district) does not prevent her from being affected by it when the time comes to retaliate publicly. Her sense of responsibility for Peeta and for Snow’s actions is pervasive, and undoes her. Because of this, her handlers in District 13 mount a stealth mission to rescue Peeta from the Capitol. The mission is a success, but Peeta has been tortured mentally as well as physically; his memories have been manipulated and modified, he perceives Katniss as a threat, and he attempts to kill her on sight. Thus ends the first half of Mockingjay, the book, with the protagonist no less motivated and no less broken, the source of her motivation rescued and alive but just as broken (and made antagonistic), and the rebellion hanging in the balance.
The Movie
The Hunger Games series is written from the first-person perspective, and so much of the backstory and interpretation of events take place inside of Katniss’ head that to simply document what happens physically would be to miss most of what makes the story compelling. The answer that Gary Ross and Francis Lawrence have come up with is twofold: one, they posit significant gestures on the screen and use the camera and the soundtrack to infuse them with significance without explicitly referring to them as significant; two, they move decisively out of Katniss’ head to depict incidents taking place between other characters.
Any cinematic adaptation of Mockingjay was going to run into difficulties with portraying conflict, but it’s especially challenging for a bifurcated adaptation; this decision essentially means that we’ve got an entire film of wind-up that ends with the characters arguably worse off than they were in the beginning. Rather than attempting to depict this reaction explicitly while still keeping a consistent tone, pace, and mood, Lawrence and co. decided to shift the focus of the story: we’re still exploring motivation and control, but we’re doing so from the vantage point of a phantom third-party observer, rather than living inside of the protagonists’ head. To this end, both Presidents (Coin and Snow) receive markedly more screen time and incident. This also serves to alter the rhythm and feel of the story’s events in several different ways; a similar tactic was deployed in Catching Fire, but not to the extent that we see here.
Mockingjay, Part 1 establishes the concept of control and motivation cinematically, right from the start; the opening provides a moment that’s as dark as anything else in a fairly dark film. It’s a single line of dialogue, said right before the opening title, written for the film. It helps to reinforce a theme not emphasized in the book: that these are teenagers and young adults. The scene manages an impressive trick of allowing these young adults to be young, and to emote openly, not possessing much in the way of control (having not had the opportunity to develop it) while also contextualizing the events of the first two films in a solidly traumatic light: no heroes here, only permanently battle-scarred individuals with no optimism left.
That’s a bleak place to start your popcorn tentpole movie from, and it’s to the credit of Part 1’s consistency of tone that it doesn’t shy away from implication as it goes on. Indeed, the movie’s increased attention given to the mechanics of the Mockingjay campaign (headed up by Coin and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Plutarch Heavensbee) continues to front the reality of: these are manipulated young adults with permanent psychological damage. The book opens with Katniss surveying the rubble of District 12; her narration tells us that she is here at her own insistence, and Coin & co. eventually caved. It’s a spare, haunting set piece, and we are clued into the fragility of Katniss’ mind, but she is there and proceeding under her own control. In the film, Plutarch pushes to have her sent to District 12 as a way of persuading her to join the campaign effort; consequently, Katniss’ reaction to District 12 in the film is considerably more raw and unsettled. The rest of Part 1 is peppered with little notes like this, and other variations on the novel’s form.
The strongest moments in Part 1 generally involve material not in the book. In one, the nation’s growing allegiance to the Mockingjay is accompanied by a folk song (the song is in the book, but not the chain of events depicted here). Another involves an attempt by Katniss to distract Snow during a stealth rescue mission, by communicating with him visually from the District 13 control room. The actual rescue sequence (also not in the book) has some striking images, but it’s narratively unnecessary; the confrontation between Katniss and Snow functions as a much more appropriate expression of Part 1’s themes. It’s a perfect counterpart to the movie’s opening. The sequence of events with Peeta’s return, and Part 1’s conclusion, follow this.
The Verdict
Mockingjay’s depiction of its protagonist and her headspace in the first half is realistic within the story’s universe, and I’d argue that it’s necessary in order to give the story’s events the proper weight, but it makes for a flatter, duller tone that’s significantly off from the narrative tightness and velocity of the first two books in the series. I limit this assessment to the first half of the book, given our circumstances right now, but this is enough to make the final book in the Hunger Games series the weakest, even if “weakest” in this case is aggressively dependent on context.
The decision to split Mockingjay into two films was an unnecessary one; the book is no longer than either of the preceding two, and one of the assets behind the books is their disciplined, strict structure: three sections, with nine chapters each. You can use this to get an idea of what would have happened to the first or second book in the series, had they been split roughly before the Games begin. We’d be left with Part 1’s that function entirely as one long setup. The employment of that technique here does some odd things to the story’s rhythm and pacing, but it works better than it really has any right to. Its biggest liability set against the book is that it provides none of the payoff that the book does, and this is something that’s going be rectified with the second film.
Assessed on its own terms, Part 1 is an improvement on the book’s first half. Both mediums share the same liability in their first half: namely, that the central character is sidelined for much of the consequential action, and only sporadically comes to life. Apart from that shared liability, the Part 1 film - by virtue of expanding the narrative to incorporate Coin, Snow, Heavensbee, and others in more significant roles - adds a layer of implication and political satire that really isn’t present in the book until well into the second half. This will serve to make two rather disparate halves of Mockingjay - the second half of Mockingjay is stuffed full of incident - flow better as a single story.
The unfortunate context here, as before, is that a Mockingjay Part 1 that’s an improvement on the first half of the book is still a weaker film overall than either of the first two Hunger Games films. I believe this was evident to the casual viewer at the time of the film’s release, and that it was at least partially responsible for the film’s noticeably lower critical score and box-office take in comparison to its predecessors. The movie deserves some credit for broadening the book’s themes and for occasionally exceeding the source material in how those themes are articulated, but this film’s success is dependent on the next film giving catharsis to those themes in a fitting way.
Book vs. movie winner: Movie, with an asterisk.