Catching Fire

   Will Catching Fire be good? How does that look? Like a worthy sequel to Hunger Games?

   And was Hunger Games that good in the first place? All of its success could be chalked up to a reasonably strong source material and the fan base behind that. I'm not knocking it. It certainly didn't make any surprising decisions, though. Oh, sure, they deviated from the book, they showed outside of the first-person present-tense head of Katniss Everdeen. It's not like anyone else wouldn't have done that.

   The first film was done with incredible competence, which is not a trait so rare in Hollywood these days, but not so common either. But, anyone competent would have done the exact same thing. I've talked about how ideally substance should lead to style, which is what happened here. It's actually quite a clever path, a line of causation that links one decision to another. T-Bone Burnett did music on the film because the book was so violent, yes?

   Let's trace the logic of that: it's a violent novel about teens killing each other; in order to preserve a rating low enough for the film's intended audience to go see it (but keep the violence high enough to preserve the core of the story that it's so easy to become dehumanized in so violent a scenario) there'd need to be some form of disguising to violence, to keep the brutality there but not be forced to show the unpleasant side effects. This meant shaky camera work: suggestive of violence and frenetic action, giving a visceral experience like the audience is actually a participant in it, while also giving the excuse for quick cuts so nothing extremely gory stays on-screen for too long. Handheld camera work suggests a documentary style, a documentary of a rural society living in the shadow of futuristic governmental oppressors suggests folk music.

   So it was well-made. As a standalone film, without a book behind it, it's better, though, since none of it's surprising with the book. (Which is generally how these things should go, so, maybe never mind.)