- Just these nine words:Finnick: (sarcastically) Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 76th Hunger Games.
- The film's brutal exhibition of war and an uprising-in-the-process, of which it firmly takes the opinion that War Is Hell. Most details are explained below, but the film shows the unfortunate truth that when a country undergoes a rebellion, everything grinds to a halt. All infrastructure is shown to be destroyed or not functional, the streets are empty (even in the Capitol, where we are shown in the previous films to be a bustling metropolis), humanitarian crisis abounds everywhere, and the people, including the civilians, are afraid for their safety at every moment.
- The fact that in addition to having heavily armed Peacekeepers gunning down every rebel on sight, President Snow had the Capitol rigged with all sorts of traps and mines by his remaining gamemakers, effectively turning the whole metropolis into one glorified arena.
- The oil trap. In particular, the poor schmuck who gets thrown in is wrenched out by a bunch of wires coming out of nowhere and apparently impaling him, hanging his oil-encrusted body over the courtyard.
- One word. One whispered word. "Katniss, Katnissss..."
- Finnick's death — yanked from the ladder to safety by a mutt, and immediately overwhelmed and devoured alive by other mutts as he can do nothing but scream and Katniss can do nothing but watch in horror. She does trigger a Holo to self-destruct before throwing it into the sewer, granting him a quick death, but it's still a dreadful way to go.
- Just those mutts in general. Firstly, they bear an uncanny resemblance to crawler zombies. And the jump scare that introduced them, especially after the suspense of several false buildups, in a scene right out of Alien or Aliens.
- Also the super-heat trap located in the underground station, which takes the life of poor Messalla. Basically, you step inside one of the pods and your body is super-heated to such an extent that it disintegrates into particles.
- And that's one of the more merciful death changed from the book, where the trap instead melts him.
- In a scene brought in from the book, that little girl screaming her lungs out over her mother's corpse.
- The explosives disguised as ration parachutes. It's a horrifying shock to see what happens when you're witnessing people being blown to pieces expecting assistance. Oh, and they explode TWICE. And Prim is killed because of this.
- When Katniss realizes what's about to happen, she desperately tries to reach Prim, calling her name in anguish. Prim has just enough time to recognize her sister before the bombs go off. It's likely that just seeing Katniss that afraid for her, Prim probably realized in her last seconds that she was about to die. Just imagine what her last thoughts must have been like.
- The worst part of it is Coin being responsible merely to rally cries against the Capitol.
- And that Gale is culpable - Gale, who has siblings probably the age of those children, and who knew and cared for Prim.
- And the unnervingly blank expression on Katniss's face after she's been caught up in the explosion — and watched her sister die. It's safe to say that THIS is the moment she crossed the Despair Event Horizon.
- Coin's lovely little suggestion that they restart the Hunger Games using the Capitol's children to sate the rebels' desire for revenge. If any viewers had doubts about her being not that different from Snow, that moment sealed it.
- Also, when Johanna votes yes to the new Games, she rather nastily points out that Snow has a granddaughter. You just know that if this idea had gone ahead, that innocent little girl would have been forced into the Games for the simple "crime" of having Snow for a grandpa. And you know that Coin would have made an absolute spectacle of the poor girl's suffering and likely death.
