Mockingjay and the Rise of Part 3.1

I saw Mockingjay Part 1 a couple of weeks ago and forgot to blog it, so mostly what I have to say about it is that yeah, I enjoyed it in a pretty grim way. It's also weirdly enthralling to see Philip Seymour Hoffman still appearing in new films, and a little distracting.

Catching Fire was a bit of an odd fish; not quite new, not quite the same again, it struggled as a movie in its own right and I think that, without the promise of Mockingjay to come it would have on balance been a failure. Mockingjay Part 1 has its own problems, in particular the '3.1' issue I'm going to talk about below, but overall is a powerful and effective film. It's a lot less intimate than The Hunger Games, which had the time to introduce us to all the children who were about to die, and in some ways loses some of its punch by graduating its protagonists to professional soldiers. Its depictions of the hell of war are still punchy, however, and its refusal to allow any 'clean' victory is a solid decision.

It's main stumbling block is the recent phenomenon of dividing the final adaptation of a trilogy (or more; it really began with Harry Potter) into two films. The rationale for this is, I am sure, largely commercial; after all, The Deathly Hallows was actually a shorter book than, say, Order of the Pheonix. The purpose of part 3.1 is to get one more year of surefire box office returns before moving on to the next project, regardless of the artistic impact.

Said impact is palpable, resulting in films that retain far more of the detail, nuance and - for better or worse - pacing of the source material. It makes, overall, for more faithful adaptations (although see also The Hobbit,) but that is not intrinsically a good thing. Films and books are very different beasts, and treating them as such can result in very tedious adaptations. As much as I love The Hobbit, the opening narration of the first film - while very true to the book - could have stood to be reduced some for the sake of pace and energy.

I think 'energy' is the key thing; what makes a book crackle is not the same as what makes a film zip. Film is a visual medium, although it also uses sound, and while reading is usually done visually literature is actually more of an auditory experience. The words are key, and while we may provide the voices to go along with the pictures in our heads, the words that we hear those voices speak are fundamental to our understanding of the text. Film making is also a collaboration between the director, writer, actors and other crew members, whereas reading is a collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Books tend to go more slowly than films, partly because it takes longer to explain something than for it to happen, and partly because they have to in order for the reader to keep pace in the evolving world inside his or her head. A film ought not to be shot at the pace of a book; that would be a terrible mistake.

Notable instances of the phenomenon to date include Mockingjay and The Deathly Hallows, as well as Twilight: Breaking Dawn. The same is planned for Allegiant, the third part of the Divergent trilogy, although the director of The Maze Runner has spoken out against the idea for that franchise. The Hobbit was stretched from one book to three films, although that was because it was The Hobbit plus a bunch of material from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings adapting it into a true prequel to the Rings film trilogy.

Similarly, A Storm of Swords became two seasons of A Game of Thrones on TV (that's twenty hours for those marveling at The Hobbit's nine.) Of course, that was also often published as two separate books, and it wasn't until Season 4 brought in chunks of the next two books that the pace felt like it was dragging a little.

Of the film examples, The Deathly Hallows was arguably the most justified. There's a lot happening and a fairly natural break, such that neither film felt like it was marking time in a Matrix Reloaded stylee. For my money, Mockingjay holds up, at least as far as part 1, and the fact that everyone I know who went in having read the books pretty much knew where the break would be suggests that that too is a natural break. I've heard much bad about the extended Twilight finale, but then I move in circles where I hear bad things about Twilight more easily than good.

The danger is that, as with The Matrix and other two-part trilogies, Part 1 will become stodgy and slow, all set-up and no pay-off, while Part 2 will be dominated by a single over-stretched PJesque battle royale, and then try to wrap up too much all at once. So far, the 3.1/2s that I've seen have worked, but I can't say for sure that they wouldn't have worked just as well as a single film. I guess I can be more certain next year, after Mockingjay Part 2.