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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.

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