I saw Mockingjay Part 1 yesterday and, having carefully avoided reviews, poked around afterward to see what other people thought. I was shocked to find them running more or less 50% negative. So heres why you should ignore the bad reviews and go see it.
The gripes
The critics seem to think that splitting the third Hunger Games book in two is a brazen cash grab, that the movie is dark and fashion-starved, and that theres not enough action.
Why theyre wrong
Because Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, and Philip Seymour Hoffman are all at the top of their games and theyve got a decent script to work with and if you like movies at all, why wouldnt you want to watch that? In particular, Ms Lawrence turns the intensity up to 11 and keeps it there for two hours; my disbelief resists suspension pretty hard these days, but Mockingjay swatted it like a fly.
Yeah, its dark; its supposed to be dark. The situation is dark. And for those of us who know how it ends, Im smelling a really clever build-up, setting expectations with no hand-tipping.
The action is pretty limited, but that District-Eight battle is a triumph of pacing and color and sequencing, large-scale visual poetry. And just because theyre not shooting at each other doesnt mean those parts of the film are boring.
Finally, theres plenty enough story here to fill two movies. My worry goes the other way: Part 1 left out the most of the flavors and events of District-13 life, and I have no idea how theyre going to squeeze the big District 2 set-piece, the crawl through the tunnels, the battle at the Capitol, the denouement, and the end-game, into a single Part 2.
Its not perfect
In the books, you never really hear any of the details of the Districts rebellion; the movie tries to fill them in and falls on its face, with unarmed colonists charging armored machine-gun-wielding Imperial Marines uh oops Capitol Peacekeepers while carrying wooden boxes full of high explosives, or swarming up trees just like the orcs swarmed down the pillars of Moria.
And also Liam Hensworth. Not just boy candy but whiny boy candy. That character could actually have been rough-edged and it would have worked fine.
Other take-aways
First, this is certainly going to go into the small list of movies better than the underlying book.
Second, while I disagreed with the critics over splitting the book into two movies, I enjoyed that nearly every one of them said &just like that wanker Peter Jackson. As one whos loathed the Jackson take on Tolkien almost end-to-end (see RoTK, Bah and Punishing Peter Jackson), I sense history swinging in my direction.