"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2" was pretty poignant and jarring. Peeta continues with his active hate for Katniss as his tired eyes and emaciated face wrenches when she enters the room. In the movie, sickly green, fleshy monsters who have rows of sharp teeth maul some of the characters. They are ominously referred to as "The Mutts.” Apparently, the Capitol created them for The Hunger Games. After Katniss gains new comrades in her quest to defeat Snow, she depends on a character who has extensive knowledge of the sewers under the Capitol. The moment where the character cries in the sewers proves to be especially poignant because he has to return to a place that he left a place in which there was no sunlight. Coupled with this fact, the viewer feels for this character because the Capitol cut out his tongue.
Another highlight from "Mockingjay, Part 2" that provides evidence for the claim that the movie is poignant is seen in the case of Peeta. An innocent character dies after Peeta pushes her into decimating black sludge because of the way that the Capitol has hardwired him. I grimaced in disgust as the members of Katniss' fictional mission crew injected Peeta so that he would no longer harm the others. My heart warmed when Katniss hesitates before shooting her bow at Peeta when he initially joins the fictional mission crew. Katniss proves that she is loyal to her loved ones during risky, pivotal moments. The movie displays the nefarious nature of the Capitol in full force. Gone are the fashion and theatrics from the previous movie. Gone is the gossip on entertainment programs. Death and destruction pervade, and the comic relief of Haymitch and the transformative style of Effie are greatly needed. You will see no sisterly bonding between Katniss and Primrose. You will not see Katniss hunting with Gale. The scenes in this movie try to gain an advantage over each other when it comes to sadness.
"Mockingjay, Part 2" seems to comment on the falseness and deception of the media because the large toothed Caesar Finkerman no longer brands Katniss in a positive way as "The Girl on Fire". Instead, he induces a smear campaign, which clearly signals that he is conspiring with The Capitol. He shows a video of Katniss and her comrades breaking into a building in the Capitol before the Peacekeepers shoot down the building. Finkerman seems disgusted with Katniss when he presents her supposed death on television. It becomes clear that Katniss is useful only when she can be used as a symbol for The Hunger Games. Because she betrays the Capitol she is dead to Finkerman.
In addition, Finkerman's surprising change of heart, president Coin proves that her relationship to Katniss is for perfunctory purposes only. After she views Katniss' purported death on television, Coin overdramatically cries and says that Katniss' death should be viewed in a positive light because she was a symbol of the rebellion against the Capitol. When Katniss views Coin's address on a screen, Katniss is taken aback and remarks, "When did she care so much about me?" Clearly, Coin, who is an ardent supporter for the rebel cause, showed emotional regard for Katniss to further her own agenda in the rebellion.
Another theme that this movie touches on is that sometimes those closest to us can act in more nefarious ways than our enemies can. At the end of the movie, when Katniss accuses Gale of drawing attention to himself with his cries so that more rebels will be convinced to storm the Capitol, he just cries and does not rebut her claim. More importantly, when Katniss and Gale go to District 2 in the beginning of the movie where rebels destroy weapons belonging to the Capitol, Gale describes the bombs that he made that was later responsible for the death of the Capitol children with the delayed second bomb that resulted in more casualties. Gale is no longer a character that is representative of moral uprightness.
Next, Snow reveals that it was President Coin's plan to drop the bombs that were masked as food on the Capitol children. Surprisingly, President Snow was not the arch villain in this movie; it could be argued that President Coin was Katniss' arch nemesis. When Coin announces that she will be interim president following Snow's execution after the rebels storm the Capitol, it is clear that Coin acted in these ways to further her political agenda. Even worse, when Coin announces that she wants to have another Hunger Games, which will include the children of the Capitol, the idea that evil is contagious and is conveyed. She plans to do the very thing for which she criticized the Capitol. Coin was supposed to be Snow's foil. She was supposed to represent good, clean, and honest leadership. Gale was supposed to be a symbol of reliability and constancy, after Peeta was too mentally unstable to be trusted. Both notions prove false when both of them betray Katniss.
