The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Is Fantastic. We Ain’t Even Mad It Was Cut in Half

Murray Close/Lionsgate

Walking into the new Hunger Games movie, it’s easy to feel a sense of anticipatory disappointment. Thanks to the many times we’ve seen one book split into two films—it was vaguely annoying for Twilight, it’ll be downright intolerable by the final Divergent movie—we’re conditioned to think of the “Part 1″ of any series as the appetizer, the cinematic amuse-bouche you have to watch before waiting another year for the main course. It’s very unsatisfying. Mockingjay—Part 1 is no different, with one big exception: It leaves you craving more, instead of feeling unfulfilled.

A lot of this is thanks to the fact that third installment in the franchise is set in an almost entirely different world than the two films before it. The Hunger Games and Catching Fire both put teenage hero Katniss Everdeen (the perpetually movie-saving Jennifer Lawrence) in an arena fighting other teens for survival. In Mockingjay she’s been rescued from the frying pan and thrown into the fire, joining the civil war her acts in the Hunger Games inspired. (It’s like Che Guevara in reverse: She was the face of the movement before she joined the revolution.)

Setting up this new battle means there’s a lot of explaining to do—and while thanks to quick direction from Francis Lawrence it all gets done in a clean two hours, here’s the even shorter version: After being extracted from the last Hunger Games at the end of Catching Fire, Katniss has been taken to the rebellion’s underground bunker in District 13, a concrete and iron structure bathed in sci-fi grey. The former Head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, to whom the film is dedicated) has convinced President Alma Coin (the chillingly believable Julianne Moore) that Katniss should be the symbol of the revolution, the star of a televised propaganda campaign to unite the people against the totalitarian Capitol. After a few humorous missteps—the rare levity in a very somber movie provides—Katniss’ plane-shooting, rally-crying face is jamming airwaves and causing revolts throughout her home country of Panem.

Remember when this happened? Yeah, that kind of caught on. Lionsgate, macro by WIRED

And thank god that face is Lawrence’s. Yes, she’s one of our best working actresses and the No. 1 Realness Keeper of American cinema, but her skill lies in being able to take a fairly unlikeable, moody character and make her believable. There’s probably no other actress under 25 who could spend nearly two-thirds of a film in a state of shocked open-mouth crying and still be fascinating. Katniss Everdeen may start revolutions, but Jennifer Lawrence could make peaceniks take up arms. Being surrounded by the likes of Hoffman, Moore, Woody Harrelson (as the newly-sober Haymitch), Jeffrey Wright (tech whiz Beetee), and Game of Thrones badass Natalie Dormer (as Katniss’ documentarian Cressida), doesn’t hurt either. (It also demonstrates how much more of a crap actors—and Lionsgate, which hired them—seem to give about this dystopian franchise than nearly any other one currently running.)

The other Lawrence’s performance ain’t so bad, either. Francis took over directing duties on the saga on Catching Fire and managed to give that movie much more weight and bravado than its predecessor (no disrespect to Garry Marshall). He does even more of that here, broadening the story beyond Katniss, whose POV is all we get in the books, and giving Mockingjay more heft than we get out of a lot of its YA counterparts. (Seriously, what other made-for-teens movie series touch on totalitarianism, social upheaval, and/or prisoner torture? And while it might be overstating to call these movies important in the Hurt Locker sense of the word, they can have an impact, especially for young women.)

Surprisingly, though, the increased scope doesn’t mean the script from Peter Craig and Danny Strong (the writer of HBO’s Game Change who also played the annoying Danny Siegel on Mad Men) has to stretch too much in order to pad out what was in Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay novel. Scenes that were only alluded to in the book—Panem rebellions and the ensuing public executions—get screen-time and there are more scenes with President Snow (played by Donald Sutherland and his caterpillar eyebrows), but other than that it’s almost note-for-note from Collins’ story.

Elizabeth Banks giving face as Effie Trinket. Murray Close/Lionsgate

There is one fantastic exception to this source-material loyalty: Effie Trinket. In the book, Katniss’ glamour team from the Hunger Games was taken from the Capitol by the District 13 rebels to work on her Mockingjay looks. Here, it’s just Effie, played to perfection by Elizabeth Banks. In a movie light on LoLs, she shows up looking like Madonna circa her pseudo-revolutionary phase and gets to say things like, “you’ll be the best dressed rebel in history.” (Suck it, everyone in a Guy Fawkes mask.) It’s everything.

And even while Effie is turned up, the story’s love triangle is blessedly turned down. In District 13, Katniss is with Gale (walking jawline and serviceable actor Liam Hemsworth) while Peeta (affable humanoid Josh Hutcherson) is being held captive by the Capitol. Gale manages to show his requisite bits of jealousy, but for the most part Katniss’ feelings towards either of them are limited to her worry about what horrors Peeta is enduring at the hands of his captors.

That is, until the end. We won’t spoil it here—especially since the reveal of where the filmmakers broke up the novel is about the only surprise the book’s fans are going to get—but those worried the movie would simply stop, rather than have a proper ending, will be relieved. It isn’t as gripping as what’s likely to come in Part 2, but Mockingjay—Part 1 does come with a proper coda/cliffhanger. It’s not a cold adrenaline rush to the heart, but it also doesn’t feel forced or flaccid.

Mockingjay isn’t perfect. But for a movie that could’ve come out looking like the franchise family’s awkward middle child, it’s incredibly mature. (And, perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t feel like it was made just so a studio could raise venture-capital levels of money at the box office, even though they probably will.) There’s action, a smart script, and nearly two solid hours of Jennifer Lawrence. And no one walking into this movie expects much more than that.