If there were an Oscar — and given the shape of the movie industry these days, maybe there should be — for Sustained Excellence across Multiple Installments of a Tentpole Saga, then the Hunger Games series would be the first worthy nominee since Christopher Nolan finished up his Batman trilogy. The movies have been shepherded by two directors (Gary Ross and Francis Lawrence), they’ve been shadowed by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman before the final film’s completion, they’ve had to deal with the source material’s difficult-to-execute shift from a garish “Teen Gladiator” opening to a grim and grinding war-movie finale. And they’ve managed it all with an impressive mix of consistency, fidelity, and craft: Mockingjay Part 2, this fall’s finale, is the weakest of the four movies, but it’s still strong enough that we can say the filmmakers basically went four for four.
The greatest credit here belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, not yet a famous movie star when she took the role of Katniss Everdeen, and now the Oscar-winning, fan-charming queen of Hollywood. As always when a franchise ends, there have been reviews expressing a kind of relief that her talent will be liberated, at last, from the grip of this particular blockbuster machine. And her upcoming schedule, featuring her third collaboration with David O. Russell and projects with Steven Spielberg and Darren Aronofsky, does look as if it belongs to a woman with something “artistic” to prove after four movies as Panem’s Girl on Fire.
Comments