Girls on Film: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay isn't an action movie. It's a war movie.

In its third installment, The Hunger Games moves beyond the glitz of the first two movies to offer a hard-hitting look at the impact of war

Hunger Games
(Image credit: (Murray Close))

After two widely-acclaimed installments, the tenor has changed in the first reviews for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. The long-beginning of Katniss Everdeen's final fight, like Harry Potter and Twilight, has been broken into two parts — and not everyone is happy with the decision.

The complaints over Mockingjay Part 1 extend beyond the perceived cynicism of stretching a wildly popular franchise as far as possible. It's a disappointment of tone, as the Hunger Games franchise moves away from many of the things that made it so popular in the first place. The Games are finally over, war is on the horizon, and Katniss, with increasingly debilitating PTSD, is caught in a drab world without any of the pomp and circumstance of the first two installments.

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Monika Bartyzel

Monika Bartyzel is a freelance writer and creator of Girls on Film, a weekly look at femme-centric film news and concerns, now appearing at TheWeek.com. Her work has been published on sites including The Atlantic, Movies.com, Moviefone, Collider, and the now-defunct Cinematical, where she was a lead writer and assignment editor.