May the odds forever be in your favour

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2013)

Hunger Games: Catching Fire I should start by telling I do not like teen movie franchises like this, I don't understand the attraction of the Harry Potter books and I thought Twilight was pretty shocking, so much so in fact I had to turn it of 30 mins into the second film as I was worried I was gonna get so annoyed with it I wold put my foot through my own rather stylish 42" HD TV. So when I went to see the first Hunger Games film I was pleasantly surprised, and I say surprised because looking the synopsis (and regular readers would know there is no chance I would have read the books) I thought it was just going to be a watered down version of my favourite ever Japanese film Battle Royal, and truth be told it does borrow a lot of the elements from that film. A future (although to the hunger games credit a far less recognisable future) in which the government has decided the only way to suppress the power of the people is to create a world in which they live in fear, and once a year a randomly selected group of children are sent to an island in which they have to fight to their death. That is where the similarity ends though and that is why I give the writer of the Hunger Games a lot of credit as Suzanne Collins has created a whole new world and a whole new future for the audience to immerse themselves in, and it's an interesting world that that we end up buying into and caring about. So that's was the first film, so was the second film of the trilogy any good? The short answer is yes. I was worried after watching the trailers that it was pretty much going to be a rehash of the first film as once again you see Katniss sent into the hunger games arena but to the films credit it is much more than that and the scenes in the actually hunger games arena are far different to the ones in the first film. The cast once again are brilliant especially Stanley Tucci who again threatens to steal the show. I had a few issues with the film (as you expect I would) especially the love triangle that I just can't buy into too, I was actually finding it slightly annoying that one minute she was acting as though Peeta meant nothing to her then the next scene she's pleading for his life to be saved and claiming she would die for him, also because this film is aimed at the teenage audience some of the plot points and dystopian metaphors are forced fed to you by the script which makes some of the dialogue come across as slightly clunky and of course this is a set up film for the final movie of the trilogy and by proxy of that it asks more questions than it answers leaving you on the predictable cliff-hanger (think Empire strikes back or back to the future 2) but I'm possibly being a little bit too harsh because this is a really good film and I am really looking forward to the conclusion, although not enough to try and read the book between now and when it is eventually released.