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Rating: 8/10 (22 November 2013)

I just watched this wonderful movie last night, and let me just say I was completely thrilled. It seemed a little fast paced, but the movie was two and a half hours long so I could see why they had to do so much cramming. For all that cramming they did pretty well. However, I went back to reading the book (which I've read numerous times and was just refreshing before I saw the movie) I noticed there were some important things missing. Then my younger sister, who had gone with me to see it but hadn't seen the first movie, pointed out some huge differences in the layouts of each movie. These are differences I can no longer get out of my head. For example, in The Hunger Games, Gary Ross made carefully sure to remind the audience through the movie that these Games are just that - Games. Its a source of entertainment for the Capitol and he refreshes this in our minds by posting the individual training scores, occasional betting board glimpses, etc. everything these kids do is a statistic and they are "graded" on how well they do. This is an important part of the game. In Catching Fire, not once did they show any training scores or betting boards or anything, really, outside of what's going on in Katniss's immediate life. Obviously they threw Plutarch in there arguing with Snow about whether or not to immediately kill Katniss, which was a good addition since you knew Plutarch was being duplicitous but also not necessary. We go through these Games as though they are just apart of Katniss's life when, in fact, they are something thrust upon her once again by the cruel Capitol. I'll say they did a good job portraying Katniss's slow mental breakdown; this is realistic. However, I digress. Back to the Games, it was a huge thing in the first movie that we saw each of the tributes faces. We mostly knew each of them and very single one made a full appearance in the actual movie sequence. In this movie we barely meet anyone outside of the first four districts and Johanna. They totally missed a small emotional scene between Katniss and Seeder, which was a reminder of Rue in the first Games. Frankly, I was surprised they had gone far enough to show us Annie Cresta for a brief second. They started out finally showing us the tributes' readings (maybe we can finally see them all!) and they cut it off completely with Finnick and Mags, whom they put in two separate scenes just to throw Annie in. We're lucky if we see all the tributes' faces in the sky as they die. My last beef with this movie was Willow's performance as Prim. Her entire dialogue was deadpan throughout, not the bright happy girl who is portrayed in the book. Prim is a crucial role in this movie, and I feel this actress hasn't done it justice. The rest of the movie was ideal. My sister never read the books and she still loved it, but I had to explain an awful lot to her and after seeing the first one, she agreed she had forgotten they were Games in Catching Fire. But the cast was wonderful, they hit more than enough key points and the dialogue was basically verbatim. Job well done, if it couldn't have been done better!