Straight to the point. The film suffers from severely bad pacing for the sole reason of trying to make half a book into a two hour movie. It doesn’t work so can everyone stop doing it!
The new Hunger Games focuses on Katniss and the rebellion’s final assault on the Capitol and President Snow. There are a lot of really good things about this film; the setting of all the traps in the city are very imaginative and cool and when they go into the sewer to avoid said traps the atmosphere is suspenseful and really quite scary, reminiscent of Alien in terms of not knowing what’s around the corner and lack of visibility. Also, the monsters in the sewer are computer generated but look really really good.
But when the action stopped, about 45 minutes before the end of the movie, the film began to show real wear and tear as it didn’t know how to properly end. I applaud their attempt to round out everyone’s stories with relative success however it just was too long for the amount of content they had to work with.
Part One actually did a really god job of introducing new characters and beginning to develop them as well as furthering our understanding of existing characters like Finnick and Effie but in Part 2 all of that work was basically for nothing as all of the characters were really quite bland and boring apart from the two most people have a problem with, Gale and Peeta. Both of which have real and interesting arcs as characters and becoming entirely new people by the end of the movie.
I really wanted to like this film because of how much I admire the original and Catching Fire but the moment they split the finale into two parts they were signing their own death warrant and this only confirms that this trend has to stop unless the source material is just too much for one film, if Lord of the Rings can do it then so can everything else.
