Movie Review: Catching Fire

A year and a half after The Hunger Games released, its sequel, Catching Fire, has arrived. First of all, the sequel is definitely darker and bleaker then the first one. The winter setting definitely helps with the latter. In spite of the darkness, there is a thread of hope that runs through the story. Try as President Snow might, he cannot extinguish the people’s hope that Katniss provided the spark for. And while the movie is different in tone than the first, Catching Fire is also very similar, as it contains a few training scenes and then a new arena and new, more diverse tributes. The book itself was my least favorite of the trilogy because it was more like a bridge between halves, and the movie is pretty close to the book. They left out a few major plot points in the movie that were in the book. The most notable changes were: (1) the bread telling the tributes when to break out of the arena, and (2) in the movie Gale is whipped for tackling Thread, not for having a turkey . The filmmakers also left out the people from District 8 that Katniss meets in the woods that established the possibility of District 13, though they did establish the possibility in another way. I thought they handled some of the book’s more questionable scenes well, and the characters are well-represented. The new peacekeeper armor makes them look better, though a little more like Star Wars stormtroopers, and the hovercrafts are the best part of the technology. Also, the movie’s ending is much worse than that of the first one. The best way I can describe the first one is “we’re done for now, but there’s more”. Catching Fire’s ending is more like a cliffhanger that feels more like “we know that we’re successful so now you have to wait a year for the next one”. There was a better, slightly earlier spot to end it that was still a similar type of cliffhanger but would have been more satisfying to me than where it did end. But when it’s all said and done, the movie falls just short of its predecessor, getting 4 out of 5 from us. We will both be going to see the next two installments even though we’re really not sure how they could split Mockingjay into two parts.