The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) - Review Thread

What’s this? Is it what I hope it is? Could it be? Could we have on our hands another case of a superior sequel to an already very good film? I think we do! Much in the vein of movies like The Dark Knight and The Empire Strikes Back, to name a few, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire brings you back into its respective world with a vengeance. Now, just to be clear, I’m not hailing this film as a masterpiece like those two movies, but there’s no denying the ante has been upped considerably. Just like the characters in the story, it’s not playing around anymore; the games are over, the gloves are off and the battle is on. Of course, having read the books, this upgrade in efficiency and quality comes as no surprise to me (especially since Catching Fire happens to be my favorite of the novels), but new franchise helmer Francis Lawrence and co. have really risen to the occasion and hit this one out of the park.

Picking up just a few months after the first smash-hit, this second installment, adapted from the trilogy of novels by Suzanne Collins, finds intrepid young heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) not basking in the spoils of victory, but rather wallowing in the disheartening consequences brought about by her clever cheating in the previous Hunger Games. For those of you not in the know: The Hunger Games are an annual tradition in the futuristic totalitarian world of Panem, where two representatives each from 12 Districts of varying classism participate in battles to the death until only one is left standing. But the most recent Games saw two victors, Ms. Everdeen and her possibly-maybe-boyfriend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), something unheard of in the history of the bloodbath. Since then, Katniss’s relationship has developed more into a question mark than anything else, with the two only being all lovey-dovey for the cameras of the oppressive Capitol. They have embarked on a Victory Tour of all the Districts, where they see firsthand the kind of grip-tightening the Capitol has enacted in each, fearful that Katniss and Peeta’s act of defiance may have sparked a rebellion, particularly from the view of President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who’s prepared to do anything to stomp out that spark before it ultimately catches fire. Things get even worse with the arrival of the 75th Hunger Games, a.k.a. The Quarter Quell, which is suspiciously worked so that existing victors must go back in the arena. And before they know it, Katniss and Peeta once again find themselves fighting for survival in more high-stakes games created by new Head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Phillip Seymour Hoffman).



As a fan of the series, and the second book in particular, I couldn’t be happier with Catching Fire as both an adaptation and as a film itself, with other fans likely to feel the same way. An element that’s really in this franchise’s favor is that the people making these films clearly with both eyes on the ball. Even though the books qualify as young adult fiction, The Hunger Games is NOT another teen franchise. Sure, there’s the issue of who’s the hotter hunk, Josh Hutcherson or Liam Hemsworth? But such a question falls to the wayside soon enough, because Catching Fire and its screenwriters, Simon Beaufoy and Michael DeBruyon, are more fascinated with exploring the equally intriguing issues and characters inherent in the world of Suzanne Collins. There’s more to this story than just bloodlust in the form of a sport, especially in this second outing, and that’s really what elevates this material from mere teen fiction and into something anybody can appreciate.

The franchise’s face of humanity remains Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, who’s even more at home by now, showing that even though she’s back in a mega blockbuster, she has no intention of making us question her recent Oscar win. The representation of Katniss on-screen is really a team effort when you think about it, but the words on the script pages wouldn’t mean as much as they do if it wasn’t Lawrence delivering them. She deftly defines Katniss as a flesh-and-blood human being who’s conflicted over the consequences of her actions from the first film, and certainly in over her head when all is said and done. Rather than playing it as a typical badass with a bow, Ms. Lawrence taps into what makes Katniss Everdeen tick: her fears, her uncertainty, her compassion, her bravery and combines it all into a commanding performance that’s leagues ahead of the kind of acting we normally see in young adult fiction. In many ways, Jennifer Lawrence is very much The Girl on Fire. Josh Hutcherson has also grown more comfortable as Peeta, and he gets meatier material to work with here as well. What’s really interesting about the relationship between these two is the duplicity, wherein their lies to the people who really think they’re in love gradually start to confuse them, which creates a very interesting dynamic. This is much more complicated than say, a certain romance between a human girl and an age-old vampire. Other returning actors such as Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland and Elizabeth Banks still shine bright, and newcomer Phillip Seymour Hoffman certainly makes a strong first impression, practically stealing most scenes he’s in.

Taking over from Gary Ross as director is Francis Lawrence (no relation to Jennifer), who not only retains the strength of storytelling here, but also even improves on it. First of all, most of you will be happy to know that the shaky cam Ross was so in love with is gone. Francis Lawrence uses steady hands when filming Catching Fire’s action, which is just as intense and visceral as the first film’s. The whole section set in the Hunger Games Arena, which this time resembles a tropical island, is exhilarating right from the moment when the starting cannon fires. This is even more of a commendation coming from me because I already knew what was going to happen in this section, and yet due to Francis Lawrence’s skilled methods of building suspense and creating danger, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The various death traps and conditions that the Tributes encounter this time around are more dangerous than anything from the first film, an aura which bleeds out into the overall tone of the entire movie. Francis Lawrence also expands the scope of the world of Panem, which is a given with the bigger budget, but still makes sure the more lavish elements don’t overshadow the bleaker tone and themes being explored. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is perhaps the most serious-minded blockbuster of the year, even more than Man of Steel, and yet that also helps it feel like one of the more accomplished.

What we have here is a major studio franchise that actually has meat on its bones, and is incredibly well-made to boot. This isn’t just people getting killed in exotic locations, but rather an action movie that’s maybe even more concerned with making sure it’s not an arbitrary experience. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire had me in a death grip by the throat from beginning to end, never relenting until the end credits rolled. Not only that, but it also instilled in me the feeling that I was reading the book again for the first time, and seeing as how I devoured that book in a short amount of time, imagine how hungry I am for more.

****/****

Dracula 's rant about Catching Fire preserved

Regular readers will know that I’m not a reader of YA literature and I’m also not overly interested in the film adaptations of YA novels. Hell, it took me over twelve years to even see a Harry Potter movie. Still, when the film version of The Hunger Games came out last year I did kind of get caught up in the hype and went ahead and saw the film simply to better understand what the buzz was all about. I didn’t end up loving the film, but it was better than I thought it would be. It had a couple elements I really liked (namely Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, some of the political allegories, the dystopic world it was set in), and a couple elements I didn’t care for at all (namely the action, the pacing, and some of its questionable production values). Most of the things I disliked were things that could easily be smoothed over in future sequels, so I was pretty hopeful that what I’d seen could serve as the foundation for a franchise that would be better than its first installment. The decision to replace the first film’s director with Francis Lawrence, a man who is pretty good at building worlds and helming action scenes, made me all the more excited to see where the series would go.

And yet, once the film was finally released I actually wan’t all that excited to go. The first film had come out in early March, a week that is generally devoid of competition, and that played a big role in my decision to begrudgingly give the film a shot a couple weeks after it had opened. This time around, Lionsgate opted to open the film in the middle of November, a time when there are probably a million other things I could be seeing. As such I decided that I’d have to skip it. I even stuck to that decision for five weeks, but then almost on a whim I decided that this was a little too big of a film to ignore, especially when everything I’d heard suggested that it was indeed an improvement over the original. Besides, I needed a blockbuster to cleanse the palate in-between prestige films, so I took the plunge. And after having seen The Hunger Games: Catching Fire I’ve got to say, I kind of wish I’d stuck with my guns and skipped it because it is not only not an improvement over its predecessor but it’s a substantial step backwards.

Set one year after the events of the last film, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire picks up with Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) back in her home district and having made a new enemy in the form of President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland), who is angry that her conduct in the games last year seems to have fanned the flames of rebellion within the districts. His hands are tied though because the people of the capital did not recognize the rebellion in her behavior and have become obsessed with the supposed romance between her and her Hunger Games partner Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). To deal with this, Snow and the new gamekeeper (Phillip Seymore Hoffman) devise a plan to turn the next year’s Hunger Games into a sort of tournament of champions as a means of forcing Katniss back into the arena, where she’ll presumably be forced to do some less than popular things and then be killed in the process.

In many ways The Hunger Games: Catching Fire feels less like the second part of a larger story and more like a simple sequel. As in, the kind of sequels that used to get hastily thrown together to cash in on a film’s success back in the day when film franchises weren’t carefully planned out from the start. Like those old-school sequels the idea seems to be less “lets further explore this world” and more “let’s take the formula from the old film and make it bigger.” That’s going to be the backbone of my case against this film: it feels like a complete rehash. Like the first film, it starts with Katniss in her district, then moves on to the capital where she needs to train and also solicit sponsors, and finally its second half is a fight to the death in the Hunger Games arena. As such it retains a lot of the same flaws that hurt the original film like the fact that it wastes way too much time in the capital before getting to the arena or the fact that it’s populated with garish costumes that have entire scenes dedicated to showcasing.

Whenever the film does deviate from the formula though, it’s almost always for the worse. For instance, the decision to have the games be populated by former players (many of whom are adults) pretty thoroughly robs the high concept of a lot of its disturbing power. These “tributes” seem less like scared masses being forced into a bad situation and more like the freakish “stalkers” who hunted down Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man. When these guys get killed in the game it feels less like the result of a brutal society and more like a bunch of bad guys simply getting killed off. In fact, for the most part, the environment seems to be a much bigger threat to Katniss and her allies in this Hunger Games than any of her actual opponents.

I also thought that the character motivations in this installment were all over the place. For example, early in the film the Peeta character is given an opportunity to not participate in the games, but chooses to anyway in order to spare the Haymitch Abernathy from having to compete. Why? Haymitch is an old drunk, what in the world would make Peeta want to sacrifice his own safety in order to save him? I suppose it could have been that Peeta was part of the conspiracy that is revealed in the film’s final moments (more on that later), even then he should have had some kind of explanation for this sudden nobility because it sure doesn’t fit with the narrative that he and Katniss are trying to sell to the wider population of this world. And speaking of people who are inexplicably trying to save other people who they seemed to previously express no affection for, why is Katniss so hell bent on saving Peeta? She spends most of the movie’s first third expressing that she’s just not that into him and that their supposed romance is just an act, but then at about the halfway point she starts to seem downright devoted to him and starts insisting over and over again that he “needs” to survive the games. This is odd firstly because, well, it kind of makes him look like a punk bitch, and secondly because she’s the one who is a symbol of resistance in this world and is clearly more important to the world than he is.

As for that twist ending… I fucking hate it. Firstly I think it’s illogical. That the conspirators keep the whole thing a secret from Katniss is itself ridiculous and kind of diminishes Katniss as this resourceful hero. Also, their whole plan seems to be entirely predicated on Katniss making a spur of the moment decision without any kind of prodding. I have no idea how they knew that that was going to happen, especially when one considers that that thing that she does which makes the big escape is kind of ridiculous. Arrows can’t generally be shot that high, and if that dome is going to completely shatter over that… it’s just silly. It’s also abrupt. It felt like the games were only barely afoot when I looked at my watch and saw that the movie was almost over. I thought to myself “how are they going to wrap all this up in so short a time.” Needless to say, I was not impressed when the answer was more or less “they aren’t.” Instead they do this convoluted and rushed plot twist that is conveyed largely through this brief dialogue scene at the end which feels more like a complete cliffhanger than like a portent for what’s to come. At least end on some kind of shot of the people marching in the street or something, don’t just cut from Katniss crying like a baby over her non-boyfriend to some cheesy looking logo.

I will give new director Francis Lawrence credit for one thing: he does seem to have a slightly better grasp on how to film an action scene than Gary Ross did. He also seems to have been given a slightly higher budget to work with, so the film generally does look a little better than the last one, but the improvement isn’t necessarily by leaps and bounds by any means. If anything it kind of makes me think I was too hard on Ross, at least he seemed to have a better grasp of how to pace his time in the Hunger Games arena. In fact, I’d say that this movie generally gave me a better appreciation of that first film insomuch as it showed how everything about that movie could have potentially been done worse. Even Jennifer Lawrence seems to be phoning it in here so that she can focus her energies on her David O. Russell projects. I remember liking her a lot in the last film, but her performance here seems to be off, there are definitely some rather brutal line readings here that she seems to botch.

More than anything, this movie’s biggest sin is that it just never seems to justify its own existence. Most of the pleasure I derived from the first film came from being introduced to this crazy fantasy world. Here we learn very little new about that world and instead just see all the stuff we saw in the first film all over again. What’s more, the story itself just seems to be treading water and setting things up for the third film, which is presumably where all the real action is going to be. Hell, pretty much everything that’s really interesting about this installment seems to be happening off screen. I would have much rather seen the rebellion being built out in the districts or seen the conspirators come up with their elaborate plan to help said rebellion than spend the whole installment watching Katniss lackadaisically replay her last adventure while being stuck in the dark about all the good stuff. All in all, I think this movie is kind of a disaster. I was about as let down by it as one could possibly be by a film that one waited five weeks to bother going to.

At last. Closure over CS being shut down.