The “Hunger Games” books and movies have always invited different readings, including as an allegory for the agonies of adolescence, but on screen, those interpretations have receded as the series has unfolded, and the story’s focus has sharpened. When the curtain rises on the third movie (the full, unwieldy title is “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1”), the games are over, and the subject of the series — war — has been revealed. Though, of course, it’s been there all along, as Amy Davidson wrote in The New Yorker on the eve of the first movie’s release in 2012: “America has been at war for a decade now; is it really a coincidence that the biggest movie of the year is the first in a trilogy in which torture, terror, asymmetric warfare and the manipulation of public opinion all play a role?”

More than two years later, the off-screen battlegrounds have shifted, but Ms. Davidson’s take remains as valid as ever. And “Mockingjay Part 1” is indisputably a war movie, from tearful start to unsettling end. Its director is Francis Lawrence, who did the honors in the second one, and he does a serviceable job again of pulling the parts together. If you haven’t seen the earlier movies, you may get a little lost; it doesn’t matter. If you’ve watched them and forgotten certain details, it also doesn’t matter. “Mockingjay Part 1” is streamlined, blunt and easy. The Capitol, the base of Panem power, is after Katniss, who is squirreled away in a part of the country, District 13, once thought to have been destroyed. Led by President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore, equal parts iron and silk), District 13 is now leading the charge against the Capitol.

Image Josh Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark. Credit... Murray Close/Lionsgate

One of the pleasures of big-ticket blockbusters is that the smart ones (Harry Potter, most obviously) often come stuffed with the best acting talent money can buy. The script for “Mockingjay Part 1,” credited to Peter Craig and Danny Strong, gets the job done, but the performers matter far more than the words they deliver. When Ms. Moore sits around a table with Jeffrey Wright (as Beetee, a tech whiz) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Plutarch, a strategist), you’re both watching a scene and seeing how great actors can give emotional and psychological specificity to blather about the art of war and the fate of a people. Hoffman, who looked so uncomfortable in “Catching Fire,” is here loose, funny and stingingly real.

There are a fair number of those war room scenes, which makes the movie feel far more claustrophobic than its antecedents. To an extent, since the rebel leaders are strategizing from a bunker, the sense of entrapment works for the story, as do the physical limitations presented by District 13, which is underground and organized around a dimly lit, multilevel atrium that looks like a repurposed silo. Yet you grow antsy in District 13, both because it’s such a dreary militarized world — created for maximum defensiveness, and that’s it — and because it locks up Katniss, who was made to roam. It’s a relief when she steps outside, even to go hunting with her best friend, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), whose moony, lovesick shtick has become a drag.