The latest Hunger Games film is almost inexplicable to me in terms of popular culture. Apart from the usual rumbling American distrust of government and "the capital", the latest instalment feels more like an indictment of the whole society that has created it.
Opening with a set of hooded executions it then proceeds to take a visual tour of the atrocities of more than a decade of the war on terror.
There are the forced statements of prisoners to camera, a pastiche of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the horror of sheltering from relentless bombing and shelling, the collateral damage of precision bombing (or the killing of civilians as you might prefer to call it).
And through it all are laced the ruins of Lebanon, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq. Buildings with their facades delicately eroded by countless bullets, sheltering refugees in their cadaverous interiors and reduced to nothing but concrete rubble pits by the jets roaring overhead. A world of poverty reduced to a mausoleum.
If this is entertainment it is grim stuff and pretty subversive for a film whose certificate doesn't allow it actually show a single killing on screen.