The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is a Deeper, Darker Sequel

The most important, impressive thing about The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is that it feels like both a natural evolution of and a challenge to its world and the people who live in it. Where the first movie introduced its universe, this one asks the questions that threaten its foundations. This is a teen movie, yes, and occasionally limited by that, but it’s a very good teen movie that feels denser and more inhabited than before, less like a movie set, more like a real world with real rules and real consequences for breaking them. It’s a movie so often defined by fear, two different kinds of fear felt by both the subjugated and those who subjugate them. Rarely has power ever felt so fragile in any movie I’ve ever seen, because one can only read between the lines and assume that the more power one exercises over their subjects, the more they must fear losing it.

One might also wonder why the government of Panem insists on telling its citizens that Katniss and Peeta love each other when it’s obvious to anyone on any given street corner that they don’t. It’s a staple of authoritarian governments, trying to control the narrative even when it isn’t necessary to do so, and the more the government sends the latest victors of the Hunger Games out on tour around their nation, the more their people reject both them and the scripts that they’ve been given – Katniss and Peeta aren’t far behind in their dwindling faith in Panem, either. And so, a desperate President Snow changes the rules for the upcoming games in a cruel twist of fate. This is a movie so often defined by the desperation of its less savory elements, and with that desperation comes violence, manipulative, angry violence.

Catching Fire comments on the fragility of totalitarian regimes in a way that few other blockbusters have. Snow wears the uniform and the snow-white facial hair well, but he’s micro-managing Katniss and Peeta’s every move on their victor’s tour through his country as if they’ll fly off the chain and spark a rebellion at any moment if he so much as gives them an inch. His motivations can only be described as a barely-concealed sense of terrified desperation, like an animal locked in a cage of the lies he’s been telling his own civilians for years. This sequel digs deeper into the politics of its world in a way that feels dense and thought-through, like there’s a real, tangible societal system – a bad one – running everything, but reaching the point of breakdown where everyone is about to realize that the emperor has no clothes. The nation is even rejecting the notion of Katniss and Peeta’s relationship, rightfully so, but you also can’t help but wish that it were real.

The budget is obviously higher here than it was in the first movie, where even the very first thing you see, a wide shot of Katniss looking over a frozen lake in winter, looks more naturalistic than its predecessor, a hair’s breadth away from breathtaking. This is a quieter, prettier, more confident sequel, one that makes Panem feel more like a real place facing the real problem of societal breakdown. The Victor’s Village, where all the winners of the games stay, may be the most misleadingly named anything, ever. Katniss and Peeta’s temporary home looks less like the Olympic Village, more like news footage of a crumbling Soviet Russia that Panem doesn't seem to be far ahead of at this point.

Even if this sequel looks and acts better than before, it still succumbs to some of its predecessor’s weaknesses, like how it feels commercial compared to the other blockbusters coming out in the theaters alongside it. The moments shot at sunrise and sunset are as spectacular as they should be, but much of the rest seems like the artificial sum of the production designer's checkbook. The sets look like sets, the costumes look like costumes, and the props look just like that – props. The soldiers and politicians wearing these costumes and carrying these props often look as though they purchased them from the expensive section at Spirit Halloween before walking onto set, and I kept asking myself a few questions every time another one appeared, namely, where are the marks? The blemishes? The wear and tear that makes these people look like they’ve lived their lives in these clothes?

Catching Fire can also feel like a stencil of another dystopian movie. All of the banners, the smiling elites, the sad civilians, and the cruel punishments are there, except watered down enough so that younger audiences will be allowed into the theater. This movie wants that wide appeal, and one can’t help but get the sense that it thematically neuters itself for that PG-13 rating, especially when you consider the brutality that turned a whole generation of mothers against the novels. Despite this, it still feels like an evolution in both its own right and for its franchise as a whole. There’s a really interesting twist near the end of the movie, one that makes a spectacular amount of sense while balancing numerous moving parts, accounting for them all, and connecting them together to make one bigger picture. Everything in this movie coheres, even if it sometimes feels like certain pieces don’t want to.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire looks at the smashing box-office success of its predecessor and takes a leap of faith as a result. There are better dystopian movies out there, but few have appealed to the rebel baked into all of us as much as this one. It’s a relatively kid-friendly film, as far as the PG-13 rating is concerned, but don’t let that make you think its cultural observations are somehow shallow: they’re deep enough to offend, which is how I like it. The villains of this movie are holding onto a power that they might have already lost, and now Katniss wants to punish them for thinking that they were above the idea of punishment. This movie is only one chapter in a larger story, yes, but it never fails to make it clear exactly why it's so important. I've not read the novels, and yet I already get the sense that Panem will never be the same again.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – 8/10

Proverbs 28:15-16