TwitView: Fans will rejoice!  Casual viewers may find the editing patchy.  Still, a worthy entry in an excellent series.  B+

Seems like forever since we’ve seen Katniss, Peeta, Gayle and the gang fight against the man President Snow in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  Heck, I’ve even watched Catching Fire on Netflix a time or two already.  But it’s only been a year.  Time flies, don’t it?  But it seems like the filmmakers have taken their time and crafted a compelling film with Mockingjay Part 1.  Screenwriters Peter Craig and Danny Strong (yes, Buffy‘s Jonathan) do an excellent job breaking the novel in two, ending Part 1 with a nice cliffhanger of sorts; the Districts readying for civil war (not a spoiler if you’ve been paying any kind of attention).

If you’ve forgotten, when last we left Katniss, she was being air-lifted out of her second Hunger Games, the 75th Quarter Quell.  Rebellion is on the horizon for the Districts, and megalomaniacal President Coin (Donald Sutherland, obviously enjoying his eeeee-vil) bent on her destruction.  In Mockingjay Part 1, she wakes up in District 13, the District that was supposedly burned to the ground.  But they’ve been waiting for a leader to rise, and Katniss looks like their dream come true.  ¡Viva la Revolución!  But where’s Peeta…?

The art department gets mad kudos for the set dressing, especially in a scene where hundreds of pure white roses are on the ground. A lovely and chilling shot, well made. So are are the battle scenes, with cinematography and sound giving viewers an idea of what it must be like to be in the thick of it. Blinding light, sudden darkness, explosions so deafening the ringing and muffled sound carries on. Grit, dust and blood. If this is Part 1, Part 2 should feel like virtual reality.

I especially love the vague traces of makeup lingering on former Capitol stylist/dilettante Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks).  It looks as if it had been applied so often in the past that even now, when she’s one of the masses in District 13, there’s a remembrance of who she was at the Capitol. (And kudos to the makeup artist who was able to keep that faint hint of lingering colors visible. Amazing work.)

As Peeta, Josh Hutcherson looks as if he did a stint in the “Bale & McConaughey Spa For Hollywood Weight Loss”; Peeta looks like a mile of bad road y’all.  But I couldn’t find anything on Hutcherson beyond the zillion teen dream postings.  (Beware: don’t Google his name unless you’re ready to ZOMGSQUEE!)  Fennick’s (Sam Claflin) speech/soliloquy at the climax of the film, in the midst of a District 13 operation, is edited well, with the operation and Fennick fading in and out from each other, depending on what’s going to give maximum impact.  The editing in this scene is well done, which makes some of the choppier bits seem like they were rushed or padded unnecessarily, as if the editor and the director weren’t completely on the same page.  Don’t worry though, fans will still be entranced.  But casual observers may feel a bit of dissonance here and there.

With all her work in so many other films, Jennifer Lawrence slips into Katniss like a second skin. In a scene where Katniss touches down onto a decimated District, her Katniss is all fire and hurt.  She earned that Oscar for a reason y’all, and it shines here.  So does Woody Harrelson as everyone’s favorite alcoholic trainer, Hamitch.  As for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Plutarch, he’s given little to do (granted, beyond Katniss this is a rather large ensemble cast including an equally brilliant Julianne Moore as District 13’s President Coin) but knocks it out of the park each time.  Yeah I cried a little.  A lot.  No shame here y’all.  And with no CGI trickery to make Mockingjay Part 2 filled with phony Hoffman, these scenes are all the more precious.  Lawrence has said “I just think to try to fake a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance would have been catastrophic and I would never want to do that.”  Beautifully put.

You’ll have another long year until Mockingjay Part 2 hits theaters.  But until then, the odds are in your favor with Part 1.