It's been interesting to watch these first two films, because they've been the first really successful action movies I can think of in quite a while to focus so centrally on a female protagonist. The other franchise that springs to mind is Alien and Sigourney Weaver's ass-kicking Ripley. That also was a sci-fi/fantasy story, and I wonder if one reason that stories like Alien and The Hunger Games are more palatable to society at large is precisely because they take place in an alternate reality. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to have an intelligent, resourceful, emotionally complex female character onscreen with bigger problems than finding/keeping a boyfriend. (You're damn right that was a dig at Twilight.)
The romance angle was the weakest part of the first film, and it's similarly underdeveloped here. Liam Hemsworth's Gale is a very pretty man, but that's about the only trait he appears to have, and why Katniss should be so attached to him remains a mystery to me. Her relationship with Peeta is more complicated. The first hour of the film is the best part, as Katniss and Peeta realize that although they may have left the arena behind, they haven't escaped it: they are part of a media machine that will keep going, as Haymitch sadly tells them, until they die. This revelation helps to explain Haymitch's angry alcoholism: in addition to having to watch District 12's tributes die every year, he's paraded around with the other "victors" in an unending pageant commemorating something despicable, and he can't refuse to be. No wonder he likes his whiskey.
The social satire isn't exactly subtle here, but then again, most satire isn't. The skewering of society's strange desire to feast on the details of strangers' personal lives and to watch them live out their lives onscreen is more aggressive than in the first film. So is its critique of our tendency to use entertainment to escape unpleasantness in our real lives.
Philip Seymour Hoffman's Plutarch Heavensbee, the new Games master, embodies this criticism. His Heavensbee is enigmatic: at one moment advising President Snow to increase the horrific violence towards the districts with a soft-spoken delight, and the next having what seems to be a heartfelt, sympathetic conversation with Katniss. Smug, quietly intense, wearing a perpetual look of amusement, Heavensbee comes across as having has his own secrets (which, of course, he has). He voices the film's most literal criticism of our media obsessions: what better way to sow fear and resentment, he asks Snow, than nonstop coverage of violence interlaced with relentless attention to the frivolous details of a celebrity wedding?
Everyone is wound tighter in this film as fissures in the media machine begin to appear. Elizabeth Banks's Effie Trinket has an increasingly difficult time keeping her cheery facade uncracked as she watches the children she's come to have a real affection for be summoned to the slaughter again. Effie's manic cheerfulness is edgier here, the product of a woman who has been confronted with the real ugliness of the world that she is a part of and is trying to cope with that cognitive dissonance, and Banks's portrayal makes Effie much more sympathetic than I expected her to be. Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman is equally manic: his grin is wider this time around, his laugh louder, his gestures broader, but beneath the purple eyebrows there is panic in his eyes as he realizes his world of flashy TV interviews is undergoing a paradigm shift.
The irony of all this, of course, is that we are watching a critique of people who delight in watching a pageant of people they don't know kill and be killed...while we do precisely the same thing. It's difficult to say whether the film is aware of the contradiction; there certainly isn't the level of meta-commentary as there was, for example, in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
Despite its many strengths, Catching Fire has some significant weaknesses. Perhaps most disturbingly to me, the film is very, very white. It has characters of color, but they're desperately undercharacterized. In fairness, most of the characters other than the main protagonists are also sketched quite faintly, and this is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in the games structure of the story: how do you adequately characterize and humanize 24 people at once? And given that most of them are destined to be quick cannon fodder, would you even want to?
Regardless of the story's inherent character limitations, I have to believe racial diversity could be better implemented than it is. Although Lenny Kravitz's Cinna looks at Katniss with sympathetic eyes (lined in effortlessly cool gold liner), there's not much more to him than that onscreen. Jeffrey Wright's Beetee fares even worse, which is double shame because Wright is a fine actor and manages a great deal with what little he's given. There is also a black female tribute who makes a brief appearance -- Enobarbia? -- but her characterization doesn't extend beyond her filed teeth, which she flashes at Katniss during training.
This trend continues the disturbing absence of racial diversity in big-screen action movies. I'm particularly confused by the lack of representation here given the first film's choice to make Rue a black character. Compared to most of the games cohort, Rue had a significant amount of screentime, and she was a sympathetic and more fully drawn character. Why was it so hard to give the characters of color some detail the second time around?
There's significantly less person-to-person violence shown onscreen in Catching Fire than there was in the first film, and part of me feels like it's a cop-out. The first film's use of violence struck me as disturbing in a thought-provoking way; watching children murder each other provokes intense dissonance. Children aren't supposed to do this. Children aren't supposed to like doing this. Granted, "children killing each other is bad" isn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Deep Thought any time soon, but I felt that there was more to the violence than that. Those children who took delight in the killing were bullies; their viciousness had simply been allowed a greater outlet than is usually accepted in society. Raised from birth to be tributes, the "careers" have been immersed in a culture that privileges their brutality, tells them they are superior to everyone else, encourages self-centeredness at others' expense as the ultimate virtue...uncomfortably familiar things from our own culture. When all the violence occurs offscreen, it's too easy to distance the protagonists from it, rather than seeing them as complicit in it, however unintentionally.
Overall, the games feel rushed. I would have liked to have seen more of the arena, and in particular its peculiar psychological effects on the tributes. After the slower, more exploratory pace of the first part, the games seem hurried, and characters who have the potential to be very interesting don't get the screentime they need or deserve.
Everyone is wound tighter in this film as fissures in the media machine begin to appear. Elizabeth Banks's Effie Trinket has an increasingly difficult time keeping her cheery facade uncracked as she watches the children she's come to have a real affection for be summoned to the slaughter again. Effie's manic cheerfulness is edgier here, the product of a woman who has been confronted with the real ugliness of the world that she is a part of and is trying to cope with that cognitive dissonance, and Banks's portrayal makes Effie much more sympathetic than I expected her to be. Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman is equally manic: his grin is wider this time around, his laugh louder, his gestures broader, but beneath the purple eyebrows there is panic in his eyes as he realizes his world of flashy TV interviews is undergoing a paradigm shift.
The irony of all this, of course, is that we are watching a critique of people who delight in watching a pageant of people they don't know kill and be killed...while we do precisely the same thing. It's difficult to say whether the film is aware of the contradiction; there certainly isn't the level of meta-commentary as there was, for example, in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
Despite its many strengths, Catching Fire has some significant weaknesses. Perhaps most disturbingly to me, the film is very, very white. It has characters of color, but they're desperately undercharacterized. In fairness, most of the characters other than the main protagonists are also sketched quite faintly, and this is perhaps an unavoidable flaw in the games structure of the story: how do you adequately characterize and humanize 24 people at once? And given that most of them are destined to be quick cannon fodder, would you even want to?
Regardless of the story's inherent character limitations, I have to believe racial diversity could be better implemented than it is. Although Lenny Kravitz's Cinna looks at Katniss with sympathetic eyes (lined in effortlessly cool gold liner), there's not much more to him than that onscreen. Jeffrey Wright's Beetee fares even worse, which is double shame because Wright is a fine actor and manages a great deal with what little he's given. There is also a black female tribute who makes a brief appearance -- Enobarbia? -- but her characterization doesn't extend beyond her filed teeth, which she flashes at Katniss during training.
This trend continues the disturbing absence of racial diversity in big-screen action movies. I'm particularly confused by the lack of representation here given the first film's choice to make Rue a black character. Compared to most of the games cohort, Rue had a significant amount of screentime, and she was a sympathetic and more fully drawn character. Why was it so hard to give the characters of color some detail the second time around?
There's significantly less person-to-person violence shown onscreen in Catching Fire than there was in the first film, and part of me feels like it's a cop-out. The first film's use of violence struck me as disturbing in a thought-provoking way; watching children murder each other provokes intense dissonance. Children aren't supposed to do this. Children aren't supposed to like doing this. Granted, "children killing each other is bad" isn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Deep Thought any time soon, but I felt that there was more to the violence than that. Those children who took delight in the killing were bullies; their viciousness had simply been allowed a greater outlet than is usually accepted in society. Raised from birth to be tributes, the "careers" have been immersed in a culture that privileges their brutality, tells them they are superior to everyone else, encourages self-centeredness at others' expense as the ultimate virtue...uncomfortably familiar things from our own culture. When all the violence occurs offscreen, it's too easy to distance the protagonists from it, rather than seeing them as complicit in it, however unintentionally.
Overall, the games feel rushed. I would have liked to have seen more of the arena, and in particular its peculiar psychological effects on the tributes. After the slower, more exploratory pace of the first part, the games seem hurried, and characters who have the potential to be very interesting don't get the screentime they need or deserve.
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