‘Mockingjay’ is No Mockery: My Review of ‘Mockingjay, Part 2’
After nearly four years and as many films, the Hunger Games “trilogy” has come to an end. So huge was the climax that, as is tradition with young adult book series adaptations (see Twilight Saga and Harry Potter), it took not one but two films to contain it. After leaving filmgoers starving for more (see what I did there?) last year, were the odds ever in the favor of Part 2?
With the war escalating, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) leads a Section 13 strike team into the Capital, intent on assassinating President Snow (Donald Sutherland), all the while everything she holds dear—including Peeta (Josh Hutcherson)—hangs in the balance.
(SPOILER WARNING!)
First, let me apologize, Giga readers, for not publishing this review sooner. Normally I’d see a film like this during opening weekend, but I waited so I could see it with my little sister when she came home for the holidays. She loves the films, and I wanted to experience it with her.
Second, I think I should give brief thoughts on the films and books before I continue, especially since this is the second half of a what’s essentially one long movie. I didn’t see the first film until I’d read the book by Suzanne Collins, for which I was glad. I honestly think the books shouldn’t be considered “young adult.” In my opinion, they’re excellent dystopian science fiction that just happens to have a teenage girl as the protagonist.
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While Part 2 has more action sequences and set pieces than Part 1, it’s still not a glorification of violence or war. Some complained this made both halves slow and plodding. I, for one, was never bored. I knew that this was a film that wanted to ponder ideas and show the ravages of war. Ask any veteran and he’ll tell you, “War is Hell.” Collins pulled no punches with her characters, and neither does the film. Every character is either broken or killed. The novel, in most respects, has a very un-Hollywood ending. There are few, if any, happy moments until that ending, and even then they are realistically tainted by tragedy. Mind you, that brokenness is a bit stronger in the novel, but it still comes through loud and clear in the film.
Yet despite showing the horrors of war, the film, like the novel, isn’t strictly antiwar. War is ugly, but it is often necessary. Those who wish to wage it, especially if for a just cause, must be willing to pay the price. This is a difficult balance to strike. In a time when war-weariness seems to be on the rise, this film dares to say there is a time and a place for a “just war.” Yet it never glorifies it. In fact, Section 13 President Coin (Julianne Moore) uses tactics that are arguably as despicable, if not more so, than that of the cruel Snow. I applaud the filmmakers for unflinchingly exploring this idea.
Media has always been a huge theme in this series. The focus has shifted from being a criticism of reality television as the brutal opiate of the masses, to its use as a propaganda tool in wartime. Both Section 13 and the Capital use state-controlled media to perpetuate a mixture of truth and falsehood, though proportions obviously differ. This is timely in an age when information is rampantly available, yet most sources are biased. Deciphering the truth in the cacophony is an almost impossible task. This is seen most strongly toward the end of the film when Snow tells Katniss it was Coin, not him, who ordered the bomb drop that killed her sister and hundreds of Capital children. She refused to believe him, a man who had lied to the masses, but he reminds her that they’d promised never to lie to each other. This forces Katniss to see Coin in a different light—and in the end, assassinate her instead of Snow.
Mockingjay Part 2 is no lightweight in terms of acting. While every actor gives a good performance, it’s Jennifer Lawrence who, unsurprisingly, steals the show. Katniss is a complicated character: a young woman of intermingled strength and weakness. Lawrence is at her best near the film’s end when Katniss has returned to her ruined home in Section 12 and finds her sister’s beloved cat, who had always hated her. She tells it Prim is gone, but when the cat ignores her, she has a breakdown. She yells at the cat, throwing dishes that narrowly miss it, until finally embracing the feline, which no longer hisses at her. Lawrence proves once again why she won an Oscar.
Becoming more common in many films these days, the special effects are a mix of practical and CGI, though it seems to favor the former. Even when Katniss and her troupe are accosted zombie-like Mutts, the creatures are CGI only when necessary, which adds to the horror. Most things feel “real” and “present,” even when it’s a CGI hovercraft flying overhead. The special effects are used not as a spectacle unto itself, but as a means of telling the story. That’s an uncommon thing in modern cinema.
Mockingjay Part 2 closes out a thought-provoking yet exciting series of films in the most appropriate way possible: with a faithful adaptation of the final novel that gives the story time to breathe while pondering its big ideas.
Final Grade: A
Going Into The Badlands: Episode 2 Reviewed
So another week has passed, and here we are, at the second episode of Into the Badlands. While the first episode didn’t exactly impress me, I was looking forward to this week’s installment. After the satisfying town fight scene in “The Fort,” I was confident in getting more good and corny action. However, I was less confident in getting a solid story and actors who haven’t recently undergone lobotomies. Despite my reservations, I still went into this with a hopeful mindset, so now I can talk about how “Fist Like a Bullet” didn’t raise my hopes much.
Action is this show’s forte, and episode two at the very least gave me more reason to say that. The first fight scene involves The Widow (Emily Beecham) fending off several minions in what I can only assume is a strip club. The Widow has an agile ninja fighting style, so much of the fight focuses on her dodging her brutish opponents and using her environment as a weapon. She jumps on top of the bar and kicks bottles at her enemies, and she swings around a stripper pole, kicking everyone around her. It all flows naturally, even giving it a unique pole dancing feel to it.
The scene does lack the interesting cinematography shown in the town fight from episode one, but that’s saved by The Widow’s flips and her marksmanship with her throwing knives. The fight also maintains a tongue-in-cheek tone, which saves it from the return of the hilariously bad blood effects. All of the problems from the first episode’s attempt at gore are preserved here. At one point, The Widow repeatedly slices a guy up, and with each swipe of her blade, the same paint looking blood from last episode splatters. All of it looks goofy, but since the fight itself features a dress-wearing ninja pole dancing her enemies to death in a strip club, goofy isn’t out of place.
Sunny, once again, gets the spotlight in the second action sequence, and it’s very reminiscent of the first one from “The Fort.” It’s Sunny against a bunch of outclassed thugs, but now in a warehouse, which isn’t winning any awards for set design, but it’s better than generic woods. The fight is oddly serious save for one visual gag. The tone was especially hard for me to take, because the gang leader reminded me of Paul Giamatti.
The theme of the fight is a race against time to save Ryder. After he is hung by the neck from the warehouse ceiling, he slowly begins to suffocate, and Sunny must clear the room full of baddies to get to him. This setup doesn’t really add much to the fight though, as Sunny still takes his sweet time fighting and making sure he looks cool while doing it. When the scene first starts, Ryder takes out a weapon as well, which got my hopes up that I’d get to see a team up between him and Sunny, but he’s strung up immediately after the fight begins. The choreography has gone up considerably for Sunny. Despite still being mostly Sunny walking all over everyone, choreography still manages to be entertaining. There’s a few interesting set pieces present here as well, including a fight on a series of steel girders and Sunny cornering himself in a small tunnel. Again, the gore effects are present, and are still bad, especially the scene where Sunny chops a guy’s arm off, and we get to see the stump. The more serious tone here does clash with the effects more than The Widow’s scene, but it’s still not a deal breaker.
Outside of the fighting, this episode did much better at keeping my attention than the last one. The plot was mostly more well paced, and I never felt the story was rushing as much as in “The Fort”. However, the characters must see something in M.K.’s “amazing” ability to emote that I simply don’t. Once again, M.K. manages to convince someone he’s just met, who’s supposed to be trained from childhood to be loyal to their baron, to directly risk their stations and/or life to help him. In this case, it was Tilda, played by Ally Ioannides, who falls to M.K.’s alleged charm. Within the first few seconds of the two making eye contact, it was obnoxiously obvious that the two would develop a thing for each other, although “develop” is a poor choice of words here. The overall M.K./Tilda plot line is a revisiting of sorts of the Sunny/M.K. plot of the first episode. The two meet, one is an outsider, the other is a baron’s loyal assassin, and the assassin brings M.K. back to their respective baron to be brought into their ranks. Then it ends with said assassin letting M.K. escape against their baron’s ultimate wishes due to a poorly developed relationship. So basically, if Sunny had made out with M.K. in “The Fort”, half of this episode would be the same.
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The B story of the episode follows Sunny’s further disillusionment with Quinn. As Quinn faces the realization that a tumor will soon claim his life, he becomes paranoid to the point of asking Sunny to kill the doctor who diagnosed him and his wife, as they are the only two who know of his impending death. Sunny refuses, forcing Quinn to commit the atrocity himself leaving Sunny to watch helplessly. This causes Sunny to commit himself fully to escaping The Badlands with Veil, who’s parents happened to be the two people Quinn killed.
This does unfortunately lead to the worst scene in the episode, where Sunny asks his friend Waldo about escaping. Waldo proceeds to spout nonsensical, philosophical mumbo jumbo that tries to explain that because living beings tend to desire to have a home to sleep in, they don’t actually enjoy freedom. The plot line itself continues many of the problems I had with Sunny’s relationship with Quinn in the first episode, but amplifies them. There’s a conversation between the two where Quinn tells Sunny about how the first time he felt alive was when he snapped someone’s neck, and Sunny looks surprised and horrified at this revelation. Last episode, Sunny had a conversation with the tattooist who marks each of Sunny’s kills on his back about becoming desensitized to murder, so why is Sunny now so affected by Quinn’s tale? Sunny’s lived with this man for almost his entire life, it’s not like Quinn is secretive about how callous he is towards human life, so why is Sunny being surprised by Quinn being Quinn as usual? The entire point of Quinn even mentioning the event is basically only to give Sunny more reason to hate him and hasten Sunny’s arc. The show’s difficulties in balancing it’s characters with it’s action makes it questionable that this episode introduced even more major characters.
The Widow was a fairly interesting character, part political schemer and part ninja. Her motivations are simple enough, kill Baron Quinn, but she also has interest in M.K.’s hidden power, and seems to be a bit more kind than Baron Quinn. She’s protective of her daughter, uses negotiation instead of brute force to expand her influence, and is capable of acting on a much more intimate level than Quinn. She also benefits from being played by probably the best actor in the show so far. While still not great, Emily Beecham provides far more genuine emotion than pretty much anyone else in the show. After finishing her fight in the strip club, she interrogates one of her assailants, and she is noticeably flustered. It shows us that she’s able to let her emotions come to the surface in high stress situations, even though she normally keeps a collected demeanor. Most of the episode is spent watching her engaged in negotiations, so we don’t get to see much more than her poker face, but there’s nothing seriously wrong with how Emily portrays the character.
Ally Ioannides is less than stellar as Tilda. She is, like Sunny, supposed to be a trained assassin, however she comes off as a hormone stricken teen whenever she’s talking to M.K. The material Ally is given doesn’t really help her in that image, as most of her dialogue is meant to establish a forced relationship between the two, and it’s hard to make an endearing relationship happen with another lifeless character. She gets a few chances to show her moves as a fighter, but in each, she never looks or sounds like a fighter. Though doubtful, I hope to see the M.K. and Tilda relationship put to the side, or at least not be romantic, so that Tilda can develop more on her own.
Despite largely taking place in a new domain, much of this episode still carries the southern plantation aesthetic. The Widow’s HQ looks similar to Quinn’s, even though The Widow herself doesn’t fit the look. Her minions wear eastern style uniforms, but this simply clashes with the environments we see them in. If The Widow fancies eastern attire, it would make sense for her to also make her living space resemble that interest. The strip club from the beginning of the episode was a good change of pace, if only for the dancer with the saw. As the series continues, and more of the world is shown, I hope to see more variety in the sets.
“Fist Like a Bullet” is an improvement over “The Fort”. It has better action, more compelling plot, and has a focus on The Widow, the most interesting character so far, but it also does nothing to solve the last episode’s problems. Sunny’s relationship with Quinn still makes little sense and M.K.’s clear James Bond-esque mystique still eludes me while he uses it to charm everyone around him. Into the Badlands still has a long way to go if it wants to achieve more than just decent TV.
Fallout 4: Settle or Wander?
Oh, I’m the type the guy who’ll never settle down. I’m never in one place. I roam from town to town.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3IlHBBGCIw
Every time this commercial comes on, I find myself whistling the song from that point on. This advertisement has become iconic with the game, for good reason. It sets the mood with it’s older sense of style, contrasted with the bleakness of the Commonwealth.
What’s interesting though is that Fallout 4, more than any other entry in the series, gives an equal option to settle as well as wander.
Sure, every denizen of the Wasteland must scavenge to survive, picking up cans for their all too precious aluminum or lighters for the oil. However, the addition of the rather deep building mechanics gives players the option to make a home out of nothing. Whole towns can be constructed in many locations, complete with the ability to make truly unique light shows and defenses to keep invaders at bay.
Not only that, but the mobile game Fallout Shelter actually gives players a hint at the community building gameplay featured in Fallout 4, complete with similar assets. Settlers can move into a claimed area, needing resources to survive and weapons to defend themselves. It’s intriguing to see groups of people create a meager existence and manning their posts. Nothing gets me motivated like one of my settlements coming under attack. Sure, few of them have names or stories, but these are people who have trusted me as their leader, and I can’t let them down. The only complaint of this system is that it can be rough to manage several settlements at once.
Many of the players I know have spent many of their hours simply perfecting their home base. As soon as the mechanics are understood, it becomes an addiction similar to that found in Minecraft or Rust. Some players have even exploited the system to create stunning works, including a recent building of a Rubik’s Cube replica. Practical? Not really. Style? Absolutely. Super Mutants can surely see it from miles away.
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Making a home is a central theme to Fallout 4‘s design; its all about being taken out of one’s comfort zone. Everything these characters have known has been blasted by the nuclear weapons and further stripped away by the dangers of living in the Commonwealth. Any way to keep one’s mind off of the Deathclaws and Raiders is a powerful thing. Preston (one of the many companions), after getting close to the player, will reveal that finding such good company changes his outlook on his entire existence. It’s a truly humbling conversation that is comparable to many other characters and stories. Its easy to get attached to them.
It’s these moments of peace and revelation that makes Fallout 4 so powerful.
I’ve spent whole evenings just discussing the layers of meaning after being blown away by a quest or dialogue. Fallout as a series has always made players think well after the controller has been put down or the program is shut down. The latest installment does this in almost every moment, especially when confronted with the ideals of the Institute or the Brotherhood of Steel.
There’s so much more to Fallout 4 than I can relay with a single article. Imagining the things yet to be discovered and the extra content surely to come is mind blowing. And the mods! Surely, the homes players carve out of the dust will continue to become more elaborate when new pieces are inevitably added by Bethesda or the modding community.
Whether one’s settling down or wandering around, the wasteland is a challenging place, filled with possibilities. Fallout 4 is truly what you make of it, and it’s tools for doing just that are awesome.
Look forward to more Fallout content in the future, as its sure to be fired up on our consoles and PCs for quite some time.
Madam Secretary: Season 2 Episode 8 Recap
Last week’s Madam Secretary may not have had a lot of action, but it certainly made up for it with plenty of intrigue. In a rare instance of camaraderie, Russell and Bess work together to bring down their newly mutual enemy Craig Sterling.
The whole plan swings into motion when Russell receives an email from Admiral Ellen Hill announcing her retirement. Obviously the President will have to find a replacement, and Russell knows if Craig vouches for a shady candidate it would lead to his demise. But before Russell can really get this plot in action, he, Bess, and other relevant staff are summoned to the situation room. The tech guy (who I finally learned is named Oliver Shaw) informs the President and company that he’s located Dash, AKA the man they all suspect Russia hired to hack Air Force One, hiding in Cambodia. Craig urges the President to send in the Navy Seals, but Bess argues that the U.S. should take a more diplomatic approach by sending in a CIA team. Russell “agrees” with Craig’s idea, but Oliver backs Bess so the President ultimately chooses to send in select CIA operatives to get Dash.
After the meeting, Russell summons Craig to his office and offers his sympathies for Bess once again gaining the President’s favor. He assures Craig that he doesn’t like her either, and that they should team up to take her down. Even though Craig doesn’t completely trust Russell, he agrees to think about vouching for General Reeves as a replacement for Admiral Ellen Hill’s position at the Pentagon. Immediately after this meeting, Russell congregates with Bess and her associate Mike B. They realize that the only way to get rid of Craig is by forcing him into his resignation somehow. They can’t expose his attempt at foiling the Cuban Embassy reopening because it will reflect poorly on the President and his entire administration.
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Later, Mike B. meets with a journalist who owes him a favor, and asks her to give Craig a little call. When she does, she claims that she has sources saying General Reeves bribed Craig to vouch for him. When he insists it isn’t true, the journalist asks for proof but Craig can’t provide it. At the time this bribe allegedly took place, Craig has it written in his calendar that he met with the senator who caused the whole Cuban debacle. Obviously he can’t show that as his proof, so he destroys the planner. Somehow Russell and Bess discover the shredded planner, and finally have grounds to ask for his resignation. By destroying his planner, Craig has broken a law which requires federal employees to keep all records of presidential meetings.
And finally the government is able to find proof on Dash’s laptop that Russia did indeed hire him to attack Air Force One, so Bess agrees to allow the United States to retaliate. The President chooses to go with the ultimate retaliation by cutting off all power to Moscow, so I’m sure we can expect even more drama from Russia this week.