Angry birds

You know it’s the third installment of a dystopian sci-fi series when your hero is stuck in the drab, humorless world of the rebel movement. That’s where we find Katniss Everdeen in Mockingjay Part 1, the penultimate chapter in the Hunger Games trilogy (stretched, by the magic of Hollywood, into four movies). She’s fled the Capitol and the Games and is being recruited by rebel leader and District 13 president Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), along with PR maestro Plutarch Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, still showing serious acting chops) to wave the rebel flag and become the resistance movement’s “Mockingjay.” This requires Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) to do a number of things that are alien to her, such as singing (an a cappella tune called The Hanging Tree that becomes a rebel anthem).

But mostly, as in third-parter Matrix Revolutions, we are cast into a world of dull-colored jumpsuits and dark underground headquarters, the kind of depressing hovel that made Joe Pantoliano wish he’d “taken the blue pill instead of the red one” in The Matrix.

Of course, all this sacrifice is necessary to show us, by way of contrast, how cushy life is for President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his well-off elite living in the Capitol. The rebellion is growing, but the rebels need a strong figure to inspire folks nationwide to stand up and fight.

Katniss, at this point, is not too happy about being used for any cause — whether it’s the Hunger Games or the revolution — but she does it, mostly to free her true crush, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) who repays the favor by telling her flock to put down their weapons and trying to strangle her.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Mockingjay Part 1 is not exactly action packed, but instead focuses on the central dilemma facing Katniss now that she’s fighting for a much bigger cause. At first she’s reluctant, and really, with her mousy hair and drab rebel getup, how can you blame her? Enter stylist Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) who rightly believes that what this revolution really needs is a better wardrobe. Voila! She provides a lookbook drawn up by Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) before he was killed off in the previous movie, so fashion can lead the fight. “You’ll be the best-dressed rebel leader in history!” Effie gushes.

This is all kind of amusing for the young girls and the gays in the audience who can barely keep it together until J.Law slips into something stylish. But Katniss is not amused, especially when Plutarch wants to film some propaganda footage (“propos,” he calls them) to broadcast to the masses, who are being pummeled and bombed daily by Snow’s goon squads. The movie takes a sudden turn into Wag the Dog territory, with Hoffman inserting war-torn footage behind Katniss on a soundstage as she strives to make an impassioned speech for the cameras.

This doesn’t work, so Katniss insists on being plunked down on the ground for real, to meet with the victims of Snow’s relentless bombing campaigns. But the masses, raised on the reality TV show of Katniss’s life in the Games, are more concerned with other matters. “What happened to the baby?” one soiled, bedraggled bombing victim asks from a makeshift hospital bed. (See, he doesn’t know Katniss was just faking her pregnancy thing in the last movie, to boost TV ratings.)

Watching Mockingjay Part 1, I couldn’t help thinking the movie is an allegory for all kinds of things, and not just “fascism in America,” as Canadian actor Sutherland has told the press. It’s a metaphor for television, and fame, and freedom movements around the world, and maybe the fashion world as well. But it’s also kind of a metaphor for Jennifer Lawrence’s career at this point: as in real life, ever since being plucked from rural obscurity, she is thrown into unrealistic situations and expected to do all the heavy work with her unscripted honesty.

This she carries off, most memorably in a speech to cameras after the hospital is bombed and she explains that the fires raging around her are a metaphor for the people’s growing discontent, and that (addressing President Snow) “if we burn, you burn.”

This taunt is also good propaganda, but Snow, as usual, doesn’t change one bit because he is like the most evil cartoon feline ever drawn by Disney or elsewhere, and continues to bat around Katniss and her allies like a (metaphor alert) cat playing with a mouse.

The Collins trilogy is good modern sci-fi because its metaphors are easy to grasp (white roses!), yet its resonance can be applied to all kinds of topical situations (note the Bangkok protesters adopting the three-fingered salute recently). The movie’s battle scenes show us the grim aftermath of war, its victims on the ground, just as we are given daily war updates through YouTube and Twitter feeds. If the Hunger Games movies advance the story clunkily at times, blame it on the Hollywood machinery.

Lawrence shows once again that she can bring life to pretty much any by-the-numbers party, but the real problem is Suzanne Collins’ already thin third book, Mockingjay, being scissored in half to stretch into two full-length movies. At least the final Harry Potter book could withstand this stretching, being over 800 pages long. Mockingjay Part 1 relies on episodic scenes instead of taut pacing, a lot of setups of Part 2’s characters back at rebel headquarters, with little of the action that drove the previous entry. Which means it’s less fun than Catching Fire, with its unexpected alliances and teen battles to the death.

But this probably won’t matter to fans, who are now treating superstar Lawrence with some of the same fanatical worship that her character enjoys in The Hunger Games. Lawrence, said to be down to earth about the fame game, tries to treat all this rabid attention with a healthy sense of perspective, yet even she must find it surreal when fans knock over barriers outside the Ed Sullivan Theater as she arrives to do Dave Letterman’s show and security has to whisk her off to safety. All in a day’s work for a superstar, I suppose.

After all, this is a girl who dropped out of high school and jokes about cooking squirrel stew back in her native Kentucky a few years back. So hero worship is something that she, and Katniss, are probably still trying to understand.