About That 'Hunger Games' Ending: Mockingjays Need Love Too (Spoilers!)

Jennifer Lawrence in ‘Mockingjay — Part 2’ (Lionsgate)

Warning: Some big ‘Mockingjay — Part 2’ spoilers ahead

In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, there’s a very brief scene in which Effie (Elizabeth Banks) and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) share a sweet goodbye kiss. There was no prior indication of a romance, and it could have been purely a tender moment between friends — but at the showing I attended, there was a visceral buzz in the theater as the audience wondered, “Wait, do those two have a thing?” The irony: no such jolt accompanied any of the scenes between Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and her love-triangle partners Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Although those potential romances are hugely significant in the Hunger Games saga, the films have a notable lack of sexual tension. And in this last installment, there’s so much effort to remove sex from the Katniss equation that it starts to feel downright silly.

Make no mistake: The Hunger Games saga isn’t primarily a love story. Katniss’ coming-of-age narrative is about the politics of war, the art of manipulating the masses through media, and how to lead a rebellion without sacrificing one’s soul. But all of those things are very abstract. The heart of the story is in the human elements: Katniss’s relationship with her family and the two men in her life. Gale is the lifelong best friend whom Katniss loves, but when his interest turns romantic, she has difficulty sorting out her feelings for him. Peeta is Katniss’s ally from the Hunger Games; in order to win the audience’s sympathy, they playact a romance for, but the lines between real and pretend quickly begin to blur. Each man’s love appeals to Katniss for a different reason, and choosing between them is a painful part of her growing up. For the films’ director, however, romance didn’t factor into it.

Related: 9 Big Differences Between ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2’ and the Novel (Spoilers!)

“These just aren’t sexual movies,” Francis Lawrence, who directed Catching Fire and both installments of Mockingjay, told the Los Angeles Times. “The romance itself too, nobody actually has time to truly think about romance…. She’s not pining over boys. It’s not like Twilight. That was all about abstinence and wanting somebody so badly. I get it in stories like that; in this, it just didn’t make sense.”

It’s easy to see where he’s coming from: Who has time to think about love when they’re in the trenches? Except: For soldiers in wartime, romance has always been a source of comfort, often giving them the strength to keep going. That’s what it is for Katniss, too. In the books (all told in the first person from Katniss’s perspective), there’s little doubt that she wants both Peeta and Gale, even as she struggles to protect herself from her own desire. Here’s how she describes the first time Gale kisses her in Catching Fire:

I was completely unprepared. You would think that after all the hours I’d spent with Gale — watching him talk and laugh and frown — that I would know all there was to know about his lips. But I hadn’t imagined how warm they would feel pressed against my own. Or how those hands, which could set the most intricate of snares, could as easily entrap me.

Bachelor No. 1, Josh Hutcherson (Lionsgate)

And here’s Katniss’s description of one significant, not-faked-for-the-cameras kiss with Peeta in Catching Fire:

The sensation inside me grows warmer and spreads out from my chest, down through my body, out along my arms and legs, to the tips of my being. Instead of satisfying me, the kisses have the opposite effect, of making my need greater. I thought I was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.

None of the kisses with Gale or Peeta lead to sex in the books (until the very end — we’ll discuss that in a moment), but there is obvious mutual desire there. In the movies, that desire is hard to detect. There’s very little chemistry between Lawrence and Hemsworth, and tragically, even less between Lawrence and Hutcherson. All of the kisses seem calculated, not spontaneous; and they are all strangely one-sided. Never do the characters lunge at one another or struggle to tear away. That teenage passion Katniss experiences in fleeting moments, that hunger she never understood before Peeta kissed her, is all but eliminated.

Watch this ‘Mockingjay’ primer:

That’s kind of a shame, because Katniss as a character has so much passion. Why couldn’t a little of that rebellious fire extend to her love life? As Francis Lawrence said, she’d never be “pining over boys” like Bella Swan; but that doesn’t mean she has to be totally asexual. Mockingjays need love, too.

The problem really becomes glaring at the end of Mockingjay — Part 2. [Warning: spoilers here] Katniss says a pointed goodbye to Gale and returns to District 12, where she and Peeta tentatively begin to make a life together. We see them eating a meal, watching the rain fall from an open doorway, and other calm domestic scenes. Then one night, Katniss awakens from a nightmare, crawls into Peeta’s bed and admits that she loves him. Presumably this will be the moment where they finally cross that threshold from friends to lovers. And then…they snuggle. There’s no attempt at a kiss, no movement towards intimacy, no sign that Peeta and Katniss’s relationship is turning into a romance.

But then! The film flashes forward to a coda that appears to take place no more than five years later. Peeta is playing with a toddler and Katniss cradles a baby. So obviously, they had sex — at least twice! But because there has been so little chemistry between them, the leap from chaste cuddle buddies to family-of-four feels crazy. And even in that last scene, there’s no apparent romantic connection: the characters are positioned in separate shots, with separate children.

Though similar to the book’s more detailed epilogue, the movie’s coda left me with too many questions. Is Katniss happy settling down to raise a family? Is that really what she wanted all along? Wasn’t she reluctant to become a mother after seeing so many children murdered? (That last one is explicitly addressed in the novel.) It’s possible none of these thoughts would have crossed my mind if the film had convinced me that Katniss and Peeta were hopelessly, head-over-heels in love. Instead, Katniss’s happiness rang false to me. The Girl on Fire deserves a romance that actually ignites some sparks.