Because Everybody Else Has One

If the box office so far is any indication, "mortal" is just about right. Whether it deserves to be neglected in quite the way it has been is, perhaps, a different question altogether but you do have to wonder what the idea was of releasing something like this against a half dozen films that are all but guaranteed to bulldoze over it. Did studios really have that much faith in the Peter Jackson name? This review is also on Channel 24 .  What it’s about In a distant future, Earth has been ravaged by man and nature as anything that massive shifts in the tectonic plates hadn’t done to destabilize the old world order, man-made warfare certainly did. The world now consists of small pockets of Easterners who are able to maintain some of the past in hermetically sealed cities where peace and prosperity are matched by glorious natural landscapes and roaming, mobile cities that pillage the land of any resources left, both natural and man-made. When a young woman with a trauma...

We can all breathe a sigh of relief: Mockingjay Part 2 solidifies the Hunger Games saga as the gold standard in YA novel adaptations. As a fierce defender of Mockingjay Part 1 (I loved all the talky bits), it's kind of odd that I have to say that, for all that it gets very right, Mockingjay Part 2 makes a strong case for smooshing the two films into one three-hour long epic. The Hunger Games' final installment is an excellent capper to the series that impresses both as a gripping piece of entertainment and as impressively ambitious social commentary that deals with class warfare, traditional warfare, revolutions, the corruption of power and the way that the media is used and manipulated in all of the above. It's brave, smart and audacious filmmaking that just happens to be a major, big-budget Hollywood film aimed, nominally, at teenage girls. Unfortunately, the one thing that stops it from ever really coming close to toppling Catching Fire as the series' best en...