Hunger Games: Catching Fire Is the Dark Knight of Young Adult Films
- 11.21.13
- 6:30 AM
There are so many ways The Hunger Games: Catching Fire could’ve failed. For one, it’s a sequel to wildly popular first installment. It’s also based on the second novel in an equally beloved book trilogy, has a different director than its previous chapter and functions as the stepping stone from the film franchise’s humble beginnings to its epic conclusion. It is, essentially, going through an awkward adolescence with a new step-dad – it should show signs of growing pains.
And yet, it blows the previous film — and most movies this year — out of the water.
Upping the first film’s grandiosity with a much more well-rounded universe, a harder-hitting message, and an even more impressive cast that includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, director Francis Lawrence’sCatching Fire elevates itself above what we’ve come to expect from young adult film adaptations. The movie is 146 minutes and not one of them feels wasted.
When we last left The Hunger Games, our heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) had won the eponymous children’s murder pageant in the future-dystopia known as Panem by outsmarting the leaders in the Capitol through a threatened double-suicide with her fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). Catching Fire picks up from that pyrrhic victory and goes even darker. Katniss, now back in District 12, is living the blessed life of a Hunger Games victor, putting on a for-the-cameras romance with Peeta and struggling with her own PTSD.
But her actions in the Games have sparked an uprising, which escalates into a full-blown revolution as she and Peeta embark on their Victory Tour throughout the Districts. Hoping to quell the rising tide of dissent, Panem’s President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his new Head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (a delightfully creepy Hoffman) devise a plan to send Katniss back into the Hunger Games with a parade of other former victors, where they bet she will either face death or dishonor from killing fellow tributes (or both).
Fans of the book will be happy to know Lawrence’s film follows the novel almost to the letter with few omissions, fleshed out from the novel’s first-person narrative of Katniss to a story of broader scope by Slumdog Millionaire adapter Simon Beaufoy and Toy Story 3 writer Michael Arndt. They haven’t taken anything away from Collins’ story, but instead punched it up with a deeper look at the machinations of Snow and Heavensbee.
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