MovieChat Forums > The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015) Discussion > Kind of Silly

Kind of Silly

posted 8 years ago by Gurtinator
2 replies | jump to latest

I don't really get why the capital rigged their own city to blow up and booby trapped it with the stupidest defenses possible. Really none of their actions make any sense in this movie.

In the first two they have elaborate impractical death traps, but it sort of makes sense given that they are being televised for entertainment. But how the heck is that practical in a war? An outdoor flamethrower that eats fuel? (At least in a sealed room it'd eat oxygen while charring.) Motion-sensor triggered guns that fire all of their ammo in random directions instead of using that same motion sensor to, I dunno, aim and track the target? Weird goo stuff that fills an arena where all the doors seal except one that conveniently leads to a building JUST tall enough to not be reached? Really? Is it any surprise the only actually effective devices were conventional landmines and bombs, which probably took about 1/100 of the time and resources to actually set up?

It also doesn't make sense why they bombed a building that showed up on camera 5 minutes earlier and declared her dead as if they never considered that she could have left. Seriously, the girl's supposedly died like 5x by now, maybe take the extra 2 minutes to actually make sure she's dead? Also, the "omg is the main character dead?" trope works way better when confined to like once per movie, tops, not every 20-30 minutes.

"So it goes" -Slaughterhouse Five

[–] CharlesTheBold 8 years ago

The Capitol is run by a sickly and aging tyrant whose judgement is failing. He is fascinated by "toys" from the Hunger Games, so that's what he uses to defend the city. He poisoned one of his main military leaders for not agreeing with him, so naturally none of the surviving ones tell him he's doing it wrong. And since the way to gain his favor is to tell him that "Katniss Everdeen is dead", that's what they keep telling him. It's not "silly", it's how a despotic government works.

[–] Spielburger 8 years ago

It also doesn't make sense why they bombed a building that showed up on camera 5 minutes earlier and declared her dead as if they never considered that she could have left. Seriously, the girl's supposedly died like 5x by now, maybe take the extra 2 minutes to actually make sure she's dead? Also, the "omg is the main character dead?" trope works way better when confined to like once per movie, tops, not every 20-30 minutes.

It may not appear to make sense in the cold light of day, and I agree that the "is the main character dead?" trope has become an overused movie cliché, but it genuinely happens a lot in real-life warfare, mainly due to a combination of propaganda requirements and the "Fog of War".

One of the real-life examples I immediately thought of during the movie was the story of the Ark Royal. HMS Ark Royal was a Royal Navy aircraft carrier during the Second World War, and gained an almost legendary reputation through her involvement in operations such as the sinking of the Bismarck. The Germans got so desperate to see her sunk that stories of attacks on her were seized on, and it got to the stage that her sinking was being incorrectly reported by German propaganda on an almost weekly basis.

The sequence in the Capitol illustrates a couple of things that I think Suzanne Collins (and the resulting films) captured really well: the sheer bloody chaos of street fighting during the fall of a major city, and the nature of wartime propaganda, where the message is usually more important than the facts...

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"So I've got bullets, but no gun. That's quite Zen."