Catching Boredom

Rating: 5/10 (26 March 2014)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire  or better: Catching Boredom.
The title says enough. In contrary to the book, the movie was really boring and uninteresting to watch. Personally, I don't like to read at all but the Hunger Games trilogy really bit me and in less than 3 weeks I've read them all. So I decided to watch the sequel after a nice first film and a really amazing book. The story in the book was addictive, interesting, exciting  and all the other good things you could say about a book. Nevertheless, the story in the movie wasn't nearly as good as in the book. It didn't get my full attention. From the beginning it was clear that the film wouldn't meet my expectations I got from the book and the trailer.
The action scenes weren't as good as they were in my head, maybe it was difficult to film it but the director could have done a way better job. There wasn't a connection with the characters, in the first film there was. Take Rue, the 12-year-old girl from district 11 who died, it really touched me. But when the old lady ran into the toxic fog in this movie, it didn't do much to me. It was certainly not because she was an old woman and not a cute little girl. With Rue we got the time to band with this character, Katniss cared about her and that made me care about her too, even after Rue's death: we still remember her 4 notes melody which was their communication method through the mocking jays.
The end was weird. It was even disappointing, you've watched the whole film, waiting for a great plot twist but then it ends. You get to see so many important things squeezed into a couple of minutes. If the director would have paid more attention to these important things than to the 'action scenes' who weren't that great, the film would be a lot more interesting to watch. Probably it was meant to be a cliffhanger but it didn't made me want to see the 3rd film.
What was interesting about the film, were all the other Hunger Games champions. It was nice to meet them, even for the short notice (so before the killing began). But all the bad things don't take away that Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson did a great job as their roll of Katniss and Peeta. They were at some points the only reason to keep on watching, how they expressed themselves as their characters was really superb. They weren't the only great actors, all the others were also great to watch.