Both opens and closes deliberately jarringly, on notes that emphasise the costs of the protagonists' actions, reflecting the film's (and the series') concern with that theme. 'Realistic' might be going too far, but realism-minded maybe isn't. Mockingjay Part 1 isn't self-contained - it picks up where Catching Fire left off, and ends without much resolution, with part 2 in the offing - and that might be part of why it doesn't produce quite the same rush as its predecessors, but that's offset by the pleasingness of its continuing interrogation of those ideas of individual heroism and agency, social dis/order and violent change in a way that's both sophisticated and slickly (in a good way) exciting.
