After the jump, I’m going to be speaking freely about the new Hunger Games movie. If you want to read a spoiler-free review of Catching Fire, Anna Minard wrote one for you last week. Once you read below the trailer, you’re going to be venturing into spoiler-filled territory.
Here be spoilers…
I liked the first Hunger Games movie much more than some of my coworkers. Despite some jittery camerawork, I thought the movie made for a fine adaptation of a very good young adult novel. The sense of danger was palpable without tipping over into gore and unnecessary violence, the acting was excellent, the script wasn’t stupid. I thought it worked really well as a film.
And I think Catching Fire is an even better movie than The Hunger Games. I wasn’t thrilled with the second book in the Hunger Games series. I thought it was too repetitive and way too obvious, a shabby clone of the first book. I think Catching Fire did more to distinguish itself from the original movie, in part because the movie could rely on visual cues to remind the audience of what happened the last time around in seconds, while the book had to include several clumsy “as you already know…” passages to set the same scene. For that reason, I have a controversial statement to make: More than improving on the original film, I think Catching Fire one of those rare adaptations that transcends the original text.
The movie does have its problems. I thought Katniss’s PTSD symptoms were forgotten too quickly, for example, and there’s still not enough Gale in the movie to flesh out his character. Philip Seymour Hoffman is basically a walking coma; he didn’t come across as wily enough to charm the (highly astute) president of Panem. (Maybe now that he’s revealed himself as a revolutionary, Hoffman will bring something more to the role than sleepiness.) In her review, Anna Minard was right to call out the promotion of the film as wrong-headed and completely antithetical to the idea of the books. Does anyone really need a Hunger Games branded sandwich from Subway? Who thought that was a good idea?
But the returning players are excellent. Elizabeth Banks brought some much-needed depth to Effie without turning sappy. Woody Harrelson managed to gracefully shift gears on Haymitch, turning a central player into a supporting character without any display of ego. Stanley Tucci is a fucking wonder of the world. Donald Sutherland’s President Snow seems believably threatened by a teenage girl. Jennifer Lawrence is an impossibly good action star. The film even chose just the right moment to end—unlike most franchises, Catching Fire gave us a satisfying climax and set up a compelling need for a sequel. Mockingjay, the last book in the Hunger Games series, felt patchy and odd as it tried to expand its scope to a whole world at war; I’m fairly confident that director Francis Lawrence can pull this cast into a war movie without much strain. At the very least, I can’t wait to see what happens next.