Excellent

Rating: 8/10 (22 March 2014)

These days I shy away from any kind of violence in movies .... I hate violence in films. There's quite enough in the real world. So, I subsist on a light diet of children's films, costume dramas, rom-coms, historical adaptations of the classics, and SF. But the violence in the Hunger Games: Catching Fire is one of the few films where the distressing violence, cruelty and torture really is justified. It is a brilliant allegory of a modern, technocratic, dystopian society where those in control of all the resources keep ordinary people starving, living in fear, at each other's throats, and diverted by a powerful propaganda machine which contains a modern-day parallel of the Roman Gladiators: The Hunger Games. It is also a story of how even the most powerful regimes, based on inequality and a reign of terror will eventually drive even the weakest, disenfranchised citizenry to revolution. I enjoyed the first movie, but Catching Fire is .... stupendous.