However mythic this figure — individual, self-reliant, “fundamentally innocent” — the illusion of freedom he enjoys is meaningful, Lewis argues, because it makes for fiction capable of “profound tragic understanding” rather than hopelessness. Even inadequately, this Adam struggles because, as with his biblical namesake, “the world and history lay all before” him; by contrast, these lay all behind Katniss, who has endured history, violence and death. Yet she goes forth into her world because she too has an illusion of freedom, one which has spared us the nihilism polluting too many movies and has meant that she is neither Adam nor Eve but something else. And it is only by being this something else (not the Girl, not the Virgin or the Whore) that she has been able both to love and to fight, including against the big bad patriarch.

The success of “The Hunger Games” series has been itself, in its bottom-line fashion, a rejoinder to another intolerant regime, that of a movie industry that continues to treat women on and off the screen as a distraction, an afterthought and a problem. A few months into its run, the second installment, “Catching Fire,” became the first movie with a lone female lead to top the annual domestic box office in four decades. That’s astonishing because it reveals the historical depths of the industry’s inequities even while it speaks to the audience’s embrace of this series. There are all sorts of reasons that viewers have flocked to these movies, including the studio hard sell, but I like to think the numbers prove that, in rallying to Katniss’s side, they’re also backing the other liberation struggle she has come to represent.

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Apocalyptic violence. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.