Topic: Catching Fire Some Observations and Marked Spoilers
I finally got around to seeing Catching Fire, having thought the first movie was very interesting despite it having a slightly hard to swallow premise. My problem with Hunger Games: the Hunger Games wasn't that I found it difficult to believe that humans would not be likely to spend their time watching children beat each other to death with rocks. The fact that the the original movie made over 400 million dollars domestically selling just that premise means there is obviously something to that concept.
My problem with the original Hunger Games, which I did not fully comprehend until last night, was that the premise is that the method the fascist government of the capital has devised to inform their citizens of the hopelessness of their situation is to place their children in a winner take all gladiator contest and fill the contestants and the members of their district with hope...Joseph Goebbels would I think be as confused as I am by this approach to control. Why this all works is, I am told, explained better in the books, but I don't see any way it could actually make straightforward sense. None the less, part one is a very entertaining movie, and nobody can honestly deny the appeal of taking a bunch of ghetto children and putting them into some sort of Lord of the Flies Thunder Dome and putting the whole thing on TV.
Catching Fire concerns itself with the inevitable fallout of a fascist state having a program in place to annually make a hero out of an oppressed person.
The president of the capital is very upset that Jennifer Lawrence is accidentally responsible for the sparks of a revolution that she seems to know nothing about and has little to no interest in joining. In order to stop her from inciting a revolution they outfit her the country's top fashion designer, a speech writer, and a political consultant, and send her on a nationally televised speaking tour, placing her directly in-front of the people the government is oppressing and scared shitless of.
Oddly, this fails to quell the spirit of rebellion and is a good example of why the British Government didn't do the same thing for Thomas Jefferson before the revolutionary war.
Despite none of this really making any logical sense, it does make a certain amount of sense in the world of the movie...and it is quite enjoyable and would have made a good lead-up to an interesting story of her losing people close to her and going underground to join/lead the rebellion against the capital....Which is where I thought the movie was going. It certainly took fucking long enough.
I was quite depressed to discover that instead of doing that the story actually involves simply sending Jennifer and her not-boyfriend back into a new more scary Hunger Games where she fights more scary type people. I found it lazy, found the first act way too long and essentially useless, and I found the fact that they refuse to let Jennifer grow as a character until the last 30 seconds of the movie, and do so by not actually having her face any real loss, to be a cop out.
In no way but story is this a less than stellar movie. The acting is great, the effects are great, and the whole thing is pretty engaging, but the source material seems to be...well it seems to be very stupid and poorly paced and lacking of logic and arguably cowardly in some respects. Once all is said and done the whole thing should probably be re-titled the Fridge Logic Trilogy. At least there are no racist robots.
On a side note, the theater I saw it at said on the tickets board that the showing was "SOLD OUT", but had no problem selling me two tickets to a basically 2/3rds full theater, so in the movies defense, fascist institutions do often think their subjects are idiots, and will make decisions to that effect that can do nothing but hurt them.
Anyway, I like the movie, I wish it made more sense.
One Time @ Bland Camp...
