By Anand Holla

First, the cautionary. Watching The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 is like catching an epic penultimate episode of your beloved TV series – engrossing and impressive, but painfully cruel in leaving you craving for the end.

Unfortunately, in this case, the season finale isn’t hitting theatres any time soon. In fact, the concluding part of this dystopian film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ feted trilogy is slated for release only next November. And that sense of nagging incompleteness it leaves you with is the biggest failing of this otherwise largely fulfilling film.

For good or bad, it’s assumed that you know your Panem from your District 12. After Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) destroyed the Games in spectacular style in the last movie The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, she finds herself in District 13, where a revolution is in the making.

With her home – District 12 – burned to the ground by President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) held captive at The Capitol, Katniss decides to become the face of the rebellion upon the insistence of President Coin (Julianne Moore) and Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

What better way to mobilise people from across all districts and fight the oppressive forces of Panem than to use against them the power of their collective obsession – mass media. But it’s not easy to market a messiah when she has crumbled into an emotional wreck.

Having survived a mindless bloodbath at the Games and now having to walk through the aftermath of another – her battered home town – Katniss must grapple with her inner tumult while slipping into the Mockingjay outfit and leading a movement.

For a Hunger Games movie, this one’s surprisingly low on action. Yet it fills up its brisk runtime of 123 minutes with a solid narrative and clever writing, delving into the emotional core of the players involved and piecing together the bigger picture.

Characters get generous breathing space to come into their own as director Francis Lawrence, who is still at the top of his game, spins an interesting yarn coloured with media satire and political pragmatism. Such a mature approach to a trilogy catering primarily to young adults is commendable.

By focusing on characters while smoothly advancing the plot, this installment infuses new charm into the series. It’s not meant to match up to the first two films, and it doesn’t need to. It has its own métier and highs; like the rebels laying down their lives to attack a dam, or Katniss singing a lullaby that snowballs into an anthem of rebellion.

Once again, the film belongs to the stunning Jennifer Lawrence, who soldiers on in a role that would make most sigh thus: Nobody could play Katniss but her. Lawrence gets to act out all sorts of anxieties Katniss is coping with, and she never disappoints. The ever-bankable Hoffman, too, shines brighter than before as his character assumes force.

The letdown, and a significant one at that, then, is in the way the film ends. Keeping with the Hollywood trend to split one film into two parts to milk more moolah at the box office – we are looking at you, Harry Potter – Mockingjay, Part 1 nearly takes the viewer for granted. But for that indiscretion, this is quite a rewarding experience for both fans and fans-still-in-the-making.

The Doha premiere of the film was held at Novo Cinemas, The Pearl-Qatar