Review – The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Catching Fire, the long-awaited sequel to Hunger Games, is a startling film to come out of Hollywood. It is both spectacular and exhilarating – I felt like running laps after leaving the cinema, for the adrenaline rush – but it is also just so relentlessly fucking bleak. And not just in context of the Young Adult audience that this film has found a following with: this film gives us a grim depiction of a totalitarian dictatorship and the anger of a people beginning to revolt against it. Dystopian sci-fi rarely goes so far, and it’s interesting that this was the film to go there.

But that all makes this film sound like a bit of an ordeal, and it’s not that either. Catching Fire is genuinely entertaining all the way through – we get melodrama, adventure, opera, whimsy and even laugh-out-loud humour. I was also struck by how consistent this film was with the first, despite having a new director behind the helm. The fact that Catching Fire has managed to capture the tone of both the books (by all accounts) and the first film so well is, I think, a triumph for Color Force, the studio that produced it. They seem to have found exactly the right people to make this adaptation work.

It almost goes without saying that Jennifer Lawrence is an absolute coup for the franchise. Her star has risen considerably since she first portrayed Katniss Everdeen, but she’s still as grounded in the role as she’ll ever be. She gives us a brave, stoic and stubborn Katniss, and she completely sells the complexity of this character with all her contradictions and internal conflicts. The result is a Katniss who is both relatable and unlikeable, which is an intriguing mix for an action hero. And the rest of the cast all give strong and complimentary performances: Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Banks, in particular, not only give much more interesting performances than they did in the first film, but they also completely compliment what Lawrence is doing. It’s easy to see why Philip Seymour Hoffman agreed to sign on for the project, because this is just a great cast, and even Donald Sutherland‘s wooden performance completely suits the tone of the film.

This series is advancing like the turn of a screw. We’re taken, with Catching Fire, through a similar three-act storyline as in the first film, but this time go a little deeper into the events of the world and see them from a different perspective. We get to see characters who are more conflicted by their loyalties than we originally imagined them to be, and witness a momentous anger in the population, one building towards a conflict that can’t help but end with millions dead. It marks Catching Fire as a timely and thoughtful film, and one I think that will ultimately prove to have the legs it needs to go on to be timeless.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAzGXqJSDJ8&w=400]