Beautiful, action-packed and overall a good adaptation

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2014)

From the very start, you can see that Catching Fire is a much bigger production than The Hunger Games. It's a good thing the movie elaborates more on the relationship between Katniss and Prim, because we finally get to see some real feeling behind Katniss' motive, which is a thing that the book lacked. Secondly, I also like how the movie elaborates on the precarious situation the president Snow is in, and how he copes with it. The movie does succeed in portraying an exotic lethal and especially dynamic arena, featuring great special effects, decors and non-stop action. The acting is good overall, although the two TV-commentators are amazingly flat characters, firing off meaningless and dull one-liners and acting ostentatiously. These are not the characters that Collins creates in the book that I criticize however, but the actual clumsiness by which the movie handles them. Actually every public appearance or speech of any kind is very empty of meaning and substance. In a repressive system where twelve districts are controlled (against their will) by a totalitarian regime, the power of propaganda should extend beyond the TV-set. What I mean is that not only the repetition of visual display of power is enough to sketch a believable world. The power of rhetoric is nowhere to be seen, which is a shame.
The movie does in certain ways improve over the book (ie. providing different points of focalization) and it does a great job in compacting the book into a consistent two hour movie.