Hunger games part 3 part 1 review

Okay, a couple of big caveats...

1) I haven't read any of the Hunger Games books. I'm not even familiar with them. So I won't have any "this was left out" or "they should have included this part from the book..."

That's not necessarily a disadvantage. Films shouldn't depend upon a lot of outside knowledge by their audience. If you can't portray something that was in the book that's a fault of the movie, not the moviegoer. Ya know, provided it's not a Bible movie or Sherlock Holmes or something.

2) this'll never be a movie blog. To really dissect a film you probably oughta watch it multiple times. So outside of the occasional Star Wars rant or my House of Cards binge, you won't see much "Men on Film" here...

That's already more preamble than this movie got... and that's a shame. It's full of characters making reference to past events Katniss "missed", and it's never shown to us, occurring or in flashbacks. 

That wouldn't be so bad, except what we get instead is about 1/3 a film of Katniss sorrowfully surveying the leftover rubble and about 1/4 a film of her buckling under the pressure of everything that happened (offscreen).

There's always a bit of watering down the punch when a trilogy is stretched into a... ummm... quadrilogy (is that a thing?). Suffice it to say this is a 90 minute movie that feels like it had 40 pages of script that just said "Katniss looks sorrowful."

There's a weird bit where the Rebel Alliance blows up The Emperor's hydroelectric dam (I'm just gonna go ahead and use Star Wars terms here because reasons). And so the ENTIRE Capital city is 100% dark. Not one generator, hell, no one lit a candle or started a fire. The Rebels in their Hoth base seem to all have lanterns and such and even use them freely when the base's oxygen is cut to 14% (which itself seems dodgy), so apparently they're not in short supply.

There were occasionally episodes of 24 or Hpuse of Cards where at the end of think "Well, shit... Nothing really happened. But then I guess someone can't die EVERY week. Sometimes you gotta have one that is really just moving chess pieces into position." 

So I guess ultimately that's what this was. A movie Millard Fillmore. Not good, not bad, just sorta caretaker to get you along.

It's just frustrating. You don't start Jedi by having your characters chat about Luke getting his hand chopped off and Han getting frozen, then show 30 mins of Leia mope. Throw the audience a bone.