“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2” has all the components of a great movie: thrilling action scenes, spectacular special effects, and even an emotive score. Nevertheless, it provides a different conclusion to the series than the one readers received in the book.
A few days after the movie hit theaters, author Suzanne Collins published a letter on Scholastic Books’ website titled “A Thank You to the Hunger Games Film Team.”
“For me, ‘The Hunger Games Trilogy’ is part of a larger goal to introduce the ideas of just war theory to young audiences,” Collins wrote. “But how much wider and more varied an audience came with the films, and the credit for that goes to all of you who contributed so much to this project.”
Collins certainly accomplished this in her books. Throughout “Mockingjay,” readers witness Katniss Everdeen simultaneously struggling to win two battles: one against the Capitol, and one against her fellow rebels.
This conflict is underscored in the novel when Gale Hawthorne, Everdeen’s best friend from District 12, presents a plan to the rebel forces that would sacrifice many unarmed civilian lives. Everdeen’s reaction helps to define her disapproval of this kind of warfare.
Collins writes: “His intent, his full intent, becomes clear. Gale has no interest in preserving the lives of those in the Nut. No interest in caging the prey for later use. This is one of his death traps.”
Though her hatred of the Capitol and President Snow is more than justifiable, Everdeen is also hyper-aware of the humanity of each citizen caught between either side of the war. With this at the forefront of her mind, she constantly creates tension by advocating for just warfare.
But this message, so integral to the concluding novel, is absent in the last film.
The screenplay stays true to most of the plot from the latter half of the final novel. Much of the film’s dialogue is even lifted straight from Collins’ pages. And yet, the audience experiences a different resolution in theaters.
Despite this close relationship between book and film, the movie fails to capture much of what made the third book different from its counterparts. “Mockingjay” shows Everdeen beginning to put her experiences in the Hunger Games arena in context with the real world — a world engulfed in war and suffering. Much of the novel narrates her internal struggle as she comes to terms with who she has lost, who she has killed, and who she is as a result of her trauma.
In the book, chapters thickened with action move the overarching theme of just war theory forward. In contrast, the movie audiences miss a lot of this internal turmoil that consumes Everdeen. Instead, the film mainly parades the audience through the basic plot, dragging out action scenes.
In the film’s epilogue, Everdeen delivers a speech verbatim from the last lines in Collins’ book. Though the words are the same, the epilogue leaves the audience with an image of Everdeen and Peeta Mellark that differs greatly from that of the original. As Everdeen coos Collins’ final words to her newborn baby, she looks across the meadow at Mellark as he plays with their other child.
This ending is bereft of the depression Everdeen and Mellark experience after leaving the Capitol. There is no mention of the fact that Mellark still struggles with vivid flashbacks from his time in the torture chambers of the Capitol, and merely hints that nightmares continue to interrupt Everdeen’s sleep.
After three films of intense sorrow and suffering, it’s nice for the audience to leave the theater with the knowledge that the few characters who have managed to survive the ugliness of war have finally encountered some peace.
But that ending doesn’t send the message Collins wanted to communicate in “The Hunger Games.”
War theory is a complicated topic that Collins approaches delicately. The Capitol is a corrupt place that needed a revolution, but rebels killed innocent, unarmed people to achieve their goal. With the tension between the means and ends of warfare, Collins’ question is approached with balance, and walks the line of pondering and preaching with grace. The movie, however, fails to give the audience a problem to contemplate — we just get a happy ending.