Mockingjay, the movie, is really cool. Kid me didn’t give the Hunger Games film trilogy a fair shot because I was still high off the masterpiece that is the original novels. I started reading Battle Royal (basically a 1999 Lord of the Flies x Hunger Games crossover, and also the book adaptation of PUBG) last week, so we decided to start watching on a whim. The third movie is particularly striking; it is a claustrophobic war film told from inside a subterranean fortress. Occasional outings into the surface wilderness or a battlefield are our only windows into the real world. The rest is told through propaganda and transmissions, like a war game.
There is one really cringe part though. After filming Katniss Everdeen’s lived battlefield trauma to create a propaganda piece. They show the final product on screen, a film within a film (kind of neat actually). A few minutes earlier, we saw Katniss shoot down a plane with an arrow, which is sick btw. Gale doesn’t even bat an eye, which is really poor character writing because the real Gale would be popping the fuck off at that. Anyway, the propaganda piece played for the audience in District 13 include a shot of Katniss shooting down the plane, but this shot is the same one that we (the literal viewers) saw a few minutes before. This is jarring because it implies that the camera used to film the Mockingjay movie physical object is momentarily one and the same with the in-universe film crew creating the propaganda. If we think about it too hard, we realize this can’t be true–the crew was not buzzing around Katniss during the battle scene. Nor could they have gotten that same exact angle. And even if they could have scurried up to Katniss and gotten that perfect angle… the fact that it is the same shot as the one we just saw makes us think of all of this in the first place.
Is it really the same shot? I’m not actually 100% certain, but I certainly got a cheesy vibe from it while watching. I had to rewind. The issue with having a movie, especially a novice/purposely shitty movie inside a movie is that the viewer is suddenly given time to reflect on the mechanics of their own viewing experience. Or maybe I just have a college degree that arbitrarily makes me think of this stuff for no practical purpose.