Show me the Hunger
Because I enjoyed the first Hunger Games film before reading the books, I was slightly worried
that Catching Fire would fall prey
to the “adaptations are always a disappointment if you’ve read the book” rule.
In fairness to the first film, it managed to stay admirably
close to its source without coming across as clunky or bookish, so maybe it was
the proverbial rule-proving exception. The second book, although a retread in
many ways, does enlarge the canvas with resistance movements and other
political manoeuvrings, pretty much ruling out such a close adaptation. Could
it still meet expectations?
In Catching Fire, Panem - your typical post-catastrophe future dystopia in which humanity has failed miserably to learn from past
mistakes - is on the verge of civil war thanks to our heroine Katniss
Everdine’s actions at the end of the last Games. No revolutionary, Katniss just
wants her family to be safe. Unfortunately, as mentor Haymitch points out, winning
the Games becomes a life sentence in itself.
Therefore, after a frosty têtê-a- têtê with the
unsubtly-monikered President Snow, Katniss is shunted onto a merry-go-round of
victory tours and forced to make pretend googly eyes at drippy Peeta (whose
parents were never the best spellers) despite her apparent feelings for miner-beefcake
Gale (whose parents gave their poor son a girl’s name).
When the trip only serves to stoke the populace's insurrectionary fires, it won’t come as a huge surprise even to non-readers
when the President sneakily bends the rules to throw Katniss back into the
Games arena alongside a bunch of other previous winners, in the kind of
superfight that boxing promoters are too lazy/corrupt to put on nowadays.
There are several reasons why Catching Fire matches its
predecessor’s success. The change of directors hasn’t affected the visual
style, Francis Lawrence wisely opting not to rock the boat and shooting with a
lot of handheld cameras in bleached colours. The resulting realism elevates the
material above cartoonier teen fare, and the contrast between the grim, wintery
Districts and the Capital’s stomach-churning opulence could hardly be sharper. All
of the violence hits home too, bringing to mind news footage of repressive
regimes from across the globe, although the parallels with Apartheid-era South
Africa are especially poignant given recent events.
Mind you, none of this would matter a jot without Jennifer
Lawrence. It’s fascinating to watch such an extreme reversal of the usual
gender stereotypes. Katniss oozes movie-star masculinity, right down to her evasive
“you know how I feel about you” response when Gale expresses his love. The
cad(dess)!
Male leads are allowed to be all emotionally constipated,
stringing every woman along whilst still being irresistable to all - it’s how
movies have worked for decades. That a female doing all this stuff doesn’t come
across as preposterous is entirely down to Lawrence, who does brittle toughness
as well as anyone regardless of gender. In the book, the love triangle stuff comes
across as an obvious and rather tedious lift from Twilight, but Lawrence makes
it work.
Catching Fire also brings comfort in repetition. The
reaping, the parades, the superbly ghastly Cesar Flickerman chatshow segments,
the training sessions, the Games themselves, all returning but with enough subtle
changes to keep you on your toes. The returning cast are reliably solid
(Stanley Tucci, having a ball again, is a particular highlight) and are
augmented by an impressive batch of new faces including Jena Malone (what
happened to her after Donnie Darko?) and the great Jeffrey Wright. And Willow
Shields as Katniss’s sister Prim comes close to stealing every scene she’s in –
to the point where I was surprised to find out that she’s not the daughter of Brooke,
as she seems like such a natural young actress.
Despite all this, we must end on a note of caution: the third
book is markedly different in structure and arguably considerably worse in
quality, and yet in the wake of Potter and Twilight it’s being made into two
films when it’s probably the least suitable of the trilogy to chopped and
stretched in such a manner. So unfortunately there’s no guarantee that the two Mockingjay
films will be any good. With J-Law at the forefront though and such an
impressive supporting cast, at least they have a chance.
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