also!! i find that they did omit pretty key details in mockingjay pt2 that i’m quite unhappy about.
like. peeta’s leg? bro he needed help because his leg was gone. not because he was weak or whatever. katniss and joanna’s training? haymitch, once again, got 5sec combined screen time?? they cut out pretty much every scene where katniss has her depressive episodes, and where she and finnick need to be sedated?? like i just find that they underplayed the trauma for the drama a lot in the movie. i mean, they focused on the action (like the books do) which is fine, more accessible to a wider audience and all that. but these are kids. you have to remember that. they’re not badass killers, they’re not hard-hearted assassins, they’re just kids. and this is so at the forefront of the books because there’s a 50/50 balance, in my opinion, with action and repercussions. like, katniss loses prim? there’s the chapter where she decides just to die, where she doesn’t know where she is and has a panic attack in a random closet in snow’s mansion, where haymitch has to comfort her because she’s so deeply disoriented, where she’s completely in pieces. there was none of that in the movies. and let’s be real, it was a multimillion dollar franchise, so budget and screentime can’t have been a problem. literally had they just made it 3 instead of 2.5 hours they would have had more than enough time to rectify these mistakes. because these details are key to the book. you can’t tell the complete story without them. and honestly, it was a bit of a letdown. true, a lot of the film was fantastically accurate, but i really can’t let these things slide. to me it’s not nitpicking, but these are so important for the full story. :(
but this being said, i don’t think that the overall message of the books was distorted too much. it was still really really accurate in some points, with dialogue lifted verbatim from the book, and the timeline was also pretty excellent. the cinematography was fantastic as well— i think what really drove it home for me was the fact that the music, the lighting, even the framing, all emphasised the symbolic importance of the moment. like when coin was framed, a single shot through the heart, deep red blood staining the concrete. that made me feel stuff.
so, in total: a pretty great movie that i definitely enjoyed. it stayed true to the message of the books, and that’s good enough for me.
