Katniss Everdeen is a badass. At one point in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1," the sequel to which was released Friday, she shoots down a fighter jet using a bow and arrow. (Relax, it's in the trailer.) But is she a superhero?
Francis Lawrence, the director of all but the first of the "Hunger Games" movies, thinks not. In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, he said that he and the rest of the team behind the blockbuster series "always think of her as a bit of the anti-superhero."
"If you look at how they try to portray her in propaganda in the movies, they try and portray her as a superhero," Lawrence said. "But the truth is, she’s actually not."
In reality, Lawrence said, Katniss is "actually a very lonely, damaged girl who really just wanted to save her sister and save her mother." Before she volunteered for the 74th Hunger Games, she was a poor, anonymous resident of District 12. And later, when circumstances conspire to make her into something more than that -- indeed, into something close to a superhero -- she resists it.
"She doesn’t want to be a symbol. She doesn’t want to lead," Lawrence said. "And she has no special powers – she’s good with a bow and arrow, but I mean, come on, in most circumstances of war, what’s that going to do?"
In fairness, it does a lot. Like taking down that fighter jet (thanks, in part, to Beetee's specialized arrows). Katniss is a great shot to begin with, because of her hunting experience, and her training for the Hunger Games makes her even better. But Lawrence said that he tried hard to keep her skills plausible. Even if, he said, there were moments in the movies when she was "maybe a little too good." They're still blockbuster movies, after all.
But there's more at stake here than nomenclature. Positioning Katniss as an "anti-superhero" is part of a larger mission to distance the "Hunger Games" movies from many of the other action movies they compete with for box office supremacy.
Most superhero movies are cavalier in their depiction of violence -- think of the gigantic blowouts at the end of "Man of Steel" and "The Avengers." But the "Hunger Games" movies are always carefully attuned to the ruinous effect that violence has on its victims, and even its perpetrators. That's especially true of the newest movie. It's full of big, splashy action sequences, but the deaths that result from them are always depicted as grave tragedies. And Katniss's insistence on minimizing civilian casualties is shown as a mark of heroism, not weakness.
Lawrence said that this theme has been a part of the "Hunger Games" ethos since Suzanne Collins began writing the books nearly a decade ago.
"She didn’t just start from a cool idea for a dystopian world," he said. "It was really starting from the idea of the consequences of war, and building from there."
Lawrence also said that he thinks "Mockingjay - Part 2" brings this theme as far as it can go in Panem. That puts Hollywood in a bit of a bind, inasmuch as the first three movies grossed over $2 billion worldwide, so some are bound to push for more movies set in the same universe -- not to mention books, TV shows and video games. Lawrence didn't rule out that possibility -- but he said that any further adventures would have to be "completely different" from the "Hunger Games" saga.
"If there’s a story and an idea that interests [Collins] in the Panem world, that would be great," he said. "It’s tricky, because I think you go for Katniss. And I think her journey is complete, so to figure something else out would have to be pretty special."
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