The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) ****/*****
By the time the original Hunger Games film was released in 2012, the series of Suzanne Collins novels it was starting the process of adapting had become popular enough that it was met with quite a bit of anticipation. Throw in a young actress who was getting ready to blow up in Jennifer Lawrence, and the recipe for financial success was there. Despite the fact that the Hunger Games was a success financially though, creatively it was a little bit of a disappointment. All of the pieces were put in place for a successful franchise launch, and the film was competent enough to not be offensive, but it just lacked that certain something that would make it a worthy adaptation of the novels that had sucked so many people in and created such a large fandom.
About a year and a half later we’re now getting the film adaptation of the second of Collins’ novels, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and while there’s no longer a question in anyone’s minds whether or not this series is going to be a financial success (it is), it’s still very much in question whether these films will improve enough to stick with fans over time and become the beloved sort of stories that get revisited down through the years and become staples in the watch cycles of fans of genre film, like the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter movies so clearly have. Probably we’ll have to wait until The Hunger Games: Mockingbird parts 1 and 2 get released to answer that question for certain, but the good news is that Catching Fire is such a big improvement over the first Hunger Games movie that we definitely appear to be on the road to that fantasy becoming a reality.
The story here picks up about a year after the end of the first film, with Katniss (Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the winners of the 74th Annual Hunger Games, getting ready to go on a promotion tour for the 75th. Once they’re out on the road, they start to catch wind of the fact that their inspirational performance in the previous year’s fight to the death has begun to incite the populace toward revolt, to the point where they’re now actively rising up and fighting against the totalitarian capitol, whose policies keep them living in a state of hunger and poverty. This little uprising doesn’t sit well with the despicable President Snow (Donald Sutherland), so he and his new games master, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), come up with a plan to take all of the previous games winners and put them back in the arena for the 75th anniversary of the event, in order to kill them all off and get rid of any potential sources of inspiration for the put-upon proletariates. This time around Katniss and Peeta not only have to figure out a way to survive against a roster of experienced killers, they also have to figure out a way to fight back against a ruling class who has them and their families targeted as threats. That’s a lot of stuff to deal with.
Some of the success of Catching Fire probably has to be attributed to the fact that it had a bigger budget and was under less studio pressure than the first film, after it proved to be a hit with audiences, but the ways in which it was able to improve over its predecessor are so myriad that the bulk of the credit still has to be given to the change of directors from Gary Ross to Francis Lawrence. The dialogue here is just a lot more natural and clever without Ross credited as a writer, the camera work is a lot less intrusive without him as a director, the effects work is less distractingly bad and the world the action is taking place in is more expansive and better established this time around, not to mention the fact that the performances here take a very noticeable leap forward from where they were in the first film. Call it coincidence if you’d like, but the evidence seems to support the theory that Lawrence is just a better fit for this franchise than Ross overall.
The action here plays out with much more weight than the action in the first film did as well. In the first film we were being told a story of child on child violence, which is pretty horrifying, and naturally the movie had to pussyfoot around and make some concessions in order to not make it come off as being horrifying and completely unpalatable to consumers. This time around the violence happening isn’t played as being adventure or sport nearly as often though, so it becomes fully realized as being horrific and debilitating to the characters. Katniss in particular seems to be suffering from a healthy dose of PTSD due to her experiences in the first film, and the effects all of the death and destruction has had on her are so well-established that once she has to fight for her life yet again, you really feel for the predicament she’s been put in. The peril just seems so much more perilous in this movie. The height of danger in the first film came from some ridiculous CG bees that didn’t come off as threatening at all, but in this movie there’s a scene where a totally believable ape holds Katniss’ head underwater and snaps at her face with his razor sharp teeth that absolutely blows away anything that she came up against in the first film for terror. Some of that added effectiveness is just due to better special effects, but more of it is due to the restraints being eased off a bit as far as the violence goes.
Honestly, the thing we really need to go back to is the performances though. The first film was more of a success than a failure probably because Lawrence and Hutcherson were strong as the two main protagonists, but in this movie the performances are so much better across the board that it almost doesn’t feel like you’re watching something that comes from the same franchise. Lawrence was great in the first film, so the fact that she’s great here doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it probably should be mentioned how well she does at providing the film with an emotional anchor. She’s great. And she especially kills a scene where Peeta’s life is put in danger and she doesn’t know whether or not he’s going to be able to keep on going. Emotion!
The place where this movie really shines over the original is in the supporting performances though. Hutcherson fares really well here, which is something of a marvel because he’s playing such a doofy character. Peeta’s always the one who’s making a mistake or who’s needing to be rescued, and it seems like he’d get on your nerves because of his constant incompetence, but Hutcherson is always able to make you feel the drama inherent in his plight, rather than just whining about it to you through the dialogue, so that you never write him off as someone you can’t be compassionate toward. In the first film Peeta was a much lamer character than he was in the books, but here he holds up pretty well.
The new faces all fare really well too. Wes Bentley’s performance as the games master in the first film basically boiled down to a silly beard, but Philip Seymour Hoffman really makes the new games master an interesting character in this one. He only gets a few minutes of screen time and a few lines of dialogue that don’t amount to much more than generic pleasantries, but he’s able to make so much out of so little that you intrinsically know that there’s a deeper mystery to his character and that you’re supposed to be paying attention to what he does. He’s just that good.
The various random combatants in the Hunger Games are also portrayed by talented names here, in direct contrast to the anonymous faces who portrayed them in the first film. The nerdy and scientifically minded duo from another district that Katniss and Peeta team up with are played by Jeffery Wright and Amanda Plummer, for the love of Mike… how do you beat that? Jenna Malone, an actress who I haven’t responded to strongly in the past, plays another one of the combatants in this movie, and she’s so believable and magnetic as an angry badass that I had to double check to make sure she was the same actress I remembered from her previous work. Francis Lawrence wasn’t a director I was very familiar with before this, but I will approach anything he does from this point forward with the expectation that he’s going to be able to get the very best out of all of his actors.
More than anything else though, Catching Fire just feels like a movie that’s got a lot to say about the things we’re going through as a culture right now. The scenes where Katniss and Peeta are being interviewed for a national broadcast look and feel so much more like real reality game shows that are popular today than anything that appeared in the first film, and one can’t help but watch those scenes here without thinking about how close we’re getting to that reality due to the current state of our morally bankrupt media. The undercurrent of revolution that happens throughout the film feels so much more prescient and important in the wake of the Arab Spring than it did when the ‘Catching Fire’ novel was first published too. Catching Fire truly feels like a film that is an important reflection of the times in which it was made. And that’s the sort of thing that’s likely to elevate a movie from being a summer blockbuster to being a genre classic that lasts on down through the ages. Fingers crossed that Lawrence is able to capture the same magic when he makes the next two Mockingjay movies.
