Up From Rubble to Lead a Revolution



'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1’ Opens

There’s a clever bit in the latest “Hunger Games” in which Katniss Everdeen, the boundary-smashing butch goddess of dystopian cinema, acts in a propaganda video. The idea is for Katniss, who’s both the spark of a revolution and its flinty strength, 
to rouse the masses with a heroic scene. Slicked up in lipstick and a Joan of Arc breastplate, she delivers her lines — “with energy,” the video director hopefully instructs her — but the scene needs tweaks. Eventually, they get it right, and the video ends with a call to “join the fight,” an exhortation that’s clearly addressed to more than one audience. It’s a funny, self-aware moment, given how extreme the stakes have become in this fascinating and strange pop epic.  Each “Hunger Games” movie makes so much noise — it’s where the deafening clamor of commerce meets the roar of true fan love — that it’s a wonder you can detect the human heartbeat under the tumult. But it’s there, thumping and sometimes racing in a franchise that, more than most industrial movies and even putative indies, speaks to both its audience and its time. There’s heart in the vague yet stirring liberation story that comes to the fore in this chapter and that’s echoed in real-life struggles around the world. And it’s there, of course, in Katniss, the backwoods savior who, as played with guileless appeal by Jennifer Lawrence, is mounting an attack on the forces of oppression.

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