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The final film instalment of The Hunger Games blurs the boundaries between ally and enemy and brings us closer to a world we recognise

WARNING: Contains Mild Spoilers

In a video recently released online, former Israeli soldier Ido Gal Razon faces a silent, expressionless parliamentary committee in a brightly lit court room. Dressed in a dark green V-neck, with his hair pulled back into an undercut ponytail, his voice is shrill with the tormenting agony of his testimony. “You say, ‘Terrorists with blood on their hands?’ I killed more than 40 people for you!” he screams, pointing and hammering his hand on the table at intervals. “I pee at night from post trauma. He comes to me and says: ‘Why did you kill me? Why did you kill me?’”

Razon served in ‘Operation Clear as Wine’ eight years ago in Gaza, which may well be one of the most accurate out of the many deeply ironic names of Israel’s military campaigns, judging by its bitter, clouded legacy. The former soldier does not – or cannot – question the narrative of his infallible government fighting the terrorists, but, instead, fiercely criticises the authorities who neglected him upon his return and denied him medical treatment, lamenting his new state of dependency. We, the hungry viewers, watch him just as he appears to slip over the edge of sanity.

When seeing this disturbing footage, it’s hard not to recall the image of the incensed, deranged Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) at the end of Mockingjay – Part 1 of The Hunger Games. We left him in this film sprawled across a hospital bed within the white walls of the recovery unit in District 13. Physically and mentally diminished, Peeta had been severely indoctrinated by the Capitol, his original memories forcefully enshrouded in hate and betrayal leading him to attempt to suffocate Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) in the dramatic final scene. Of course, for Peeta, the medical treatment to un-do his “hijacking” is of utmost priority to the opposition rebels, but the question of loyalty – as with all cases of war – cuts through this story with a piercing poignancy.

The fourth film and the final instalment of the trilogy, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part Two, directed by Francis Lawrence, opens with Katniss coming to consciousness and feeling her bruised neck following Peeta’s attack. The bruise, of course, runs deeper in her knowledge of Peeta’s illness. Worn out by the arena of war, both during the Capitol’s initial staged tournaments and its later escalation to full-scale destruction of the districts, her eyes are weary, her face is bare and unpainted in this film, and she sets out with firm but cold resolve to take revenge on the dictator, President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland).

Crushed by her own form of post-traumatic stress disorder, Katniss is at first swayed by the self-proclaimed leader of the resistance movement, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), whose strikingly straight grey hair and sharp jawbones set us on edge immediately. Doomed to be a tool of this war, Katniss is cubby-holed into the role of countering the Capitol’s propaganda machine, just as when she was plucked from the ruins of District 13 to become the symbolic poster-girl of the revolution – the dark Mockingjay – of the last film. Even before this, in Catching Fire, the Capitol’s President Snow threatened to ruin her hometown of District 12 should she resist. But her designated – dictated – purpose is far from where her heart lies. She is ready to be the first to take down the Capitol.

With this purpose in mind, Katniss insists on being sent to the frontlines and sets off under the guidance of Boggs (Mahershala Ali) with her military unit. President Coin, unsurprisingly, alarms the team when she asks them to simply focus on filming and marketing their victories en route to the centre of the Capitol. They press on, perpetually beneath the camera lens of the totalitarian state, dodging the “pods” or concealed traps that have been put in place. Eventually detaching herself from Coin’s orders, Katniss takes over from Boggs, navigating the Capitol’s underground sewers to reach Snow’s mansion – not without significant losses. We watch Coin with growing suspicion, seeing her calmly contain her agitation with Katniss and use increasingly authoritarian nuances in her language. Meanwhile, Coin and Snow battle on to reach the hearts and minds of the nation of Panem by taking charge of the television broadcasts and power flits between the two of them.

“The enemy is not like us. They do not share our values. They have never known our comforts and our sophistication and they despise us for it. They are coming to destroy our way of life,” declares Snow, his words perfectly conveying the white supremacist framework, and echoing the eerily familiar superiority complex of the western, developed world – most recently articulated in responses to the Paris attacks and in the fear-mongering statements of US presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Upon hearing that the rebels have entered District 1, Snow declares his mansion an open refuge for the wealthy inhabitants of the region, giving an opportunity for Katniss’ team to disguise themselves among the crowds and get closer to him. It is amid this race for safety that the biggest disaster of the film takes place, when bombs are dropped from silver parachutes in two deadly rounds becoming the cause for mass civilian death. It is crucial to note, here, that it is initially unclear who the perpetrators are, demonstrating the blurred lines of conflict – the conflation of a sense of purpose and worthlessness. As the story comes to a conclusion, the moment Katniss has been waiting for emerges. She fires the final arrow with unabated conviction towards an enemy who stands high above the huge gathering – a moment that is so tense and in a space that is so sterile that the spilling of blood comes as both a shock and a relief.

While the commotion around the adaptations of The Hunger Games trilogy appears to have died down, Mockingjay – Part Two has performed consistently yet quietly at the box office since its UK release last month. The film’s emotive moments do not compete with scenes such as the death of Rue (Amandla Stenberg) in the first instalment or Jennifer Lawrence’s chilling rendition of ‘The Hanging Tree’ in Mockingjay – Part One. In addition, strong characters such as Commander Lyme – a democratic black female leader no less – are starkly underdeveloped. The film’s adolescent theme and lack of grittiness have also held back some cinema-goers, and, indeed, the love triangle is unconvincing and falls flat, just as it does in Suzanne Collins’ original novel.

However, it is this lack of passion which pervades the finale that is most interesting. The indifferent, fatigued expressions and downtrodden spirits reflect the anti-climax of revolution and the murky aftermath of war, where democracy is of little relevance. The fiction could not have been more timely in this respect. We are the generation which has witnessed the Arab Spring in all its stages; we saw regimes fall, dictators imprisoned, new coups arise and the same despots released into freedom as in the case of Egypt; we felt the thrill of a people rising against their inherited tyrant, quashed, then splintered into hundreds of rebel groups and dispersed as refugees, arriving dead on our shores, as in the case of Syria. The definitions of truth and falsehood emerge convoluted at the close of The Hunger Games and roles are reversed with a painful blatancy, and, therefore, Peeta’s question of “real or not real?” underpins all power struggles in Panem and our very own daily predicament.

The Capitol, quite clearly, stands in parallel with our modern, developed world, a world in which “Peacekeepers” kill indiscriminately in an attempt to control society. Truth is caught between the propaganda wars of the state and of the people, where an apparatus like a mobile device at once serves to empower individuals and becomes the source of increased state surveillance. The film perfectly echoes how the material glitz of our capitalist world can blind us to the privacy laws being passed at our expense, where, just recently, Congress quietly slipped in a “cybersecurity” surveillance bill into the budget in the US, while we were too busy talking about Miss Universe to notice. The film also reportedly inspired protestors to spray-paint a landmark in Ferguson last year with the Mockingjay quote, “If we burn, you burn with us.” It even caused some commentators to express concern over the possibility that countries like Israel may be implicated amid District 12’s rubble.

Grappling to understand the truth and to define the moral boundaries of power is maddening enough – as it was for Israeli soldier, Ido Gal Razon. While Katniss’ future is bathed in the surreal sunset and she has achieved the “life of a victor” as instructed, she is plagued by the trauma of what she has witnessed. She smiles blankly. There is a void. Her world is void of victory – void of reality.

Image from: http://mashable.com/2015/06/09/first-the-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-2-trailer-is-here/#2YXvXdFeDkqy