Saturday, December 05, 2015

Scariest things about the Hunger Games: Mockingjay



The scariest thing about the "Mockingjay" movies from the Hunger Games series, is how they are eerily realistic portrayals of war.  In Part 1, an entire movie is spent dealing with wartime post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has affected and messed up the lives of so many veterans.  In Part 2, the plot revolves around three overarching themes, namely how in wartime:

1) there are no heroes, just confusion -- nobody knows who did what, or why, in the fog of war.
2) there is no good vs evil  -- just each side fighting for its own self-interests.  Any narratives would be determined post-war, by the victors.
3) there are no winners in war, just losers, with innocent civilians losing the most.

Another creepy parallel is the rebels' heavy use of propaganda in Mockingjay, just like ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

The point is that it doesn't matter what Katniss does, or what the rest of the characters do, or the fact that they exist at all.  The outcome of the war is determined by things happening outside of anybody's control, by bombs exploding in the right/wrong place/time, and knows who triggered which explosions.....

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