A Familiar Arena

The Hunger Games: Catching FireDirected by Francis Lawrence
Two and One Half Stars

By Jonathan Fisher

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire envisions a future in which an oligarchy rules with an iron fist, while its poverty-stricken masses are sedated by a cruel and callous ‘sport’ in which competitors are thrust into an arena and forced to fight to the death.

There are analogies all over the place in the Hunger Games series. It is clear that the world envisaged by original source author Suzanne Collins is a vague extension of our own. The rich wield all the power while the downtrodden masses toil away with little to no real democratic voice. The people at the top of society hammer their underlings with moronic diversions in order to keep them from revolting. The series’ heroine, Katniss Everdeen (played in the movies by the talented Jennifer Lawrence) is a young woman with passion and drive, who finds her desire to change the world stymied by her preoccupation with simply surviving.

The first Hunger Games film was an enormously popular vehicle, due in no small measure to the success of the book upon which it was based. I am yet to read the novels, but am assured by my older primary students and their families that they are compelling, thrilling and thought-provoking. It seems they are allowing youngsters everywhere the opportunity to increase their word knowledge, which is no small thing.

Be that as it may, I found the first film mildly enjoyable, but hopelessly simplistic. Apply a grown person’s logic to the scenario and Swiss cheese-sized holes begin to appear. How is all this wealth maintained? How has all memory of the previously proud and prosperous nation that the United States once was been wiped? Is there no revolutionary spirit left in these people? As for the hunger games – the masses seem in no way brainwashed into believing their oligarchs’ lies about the ‘great leap forward’ that is sure to be coming to them. This is less North Korea and more brutal Khmer Rouge, as districts are publicly beaten, tortured and executed. Are these people really sated by something as obviously hollow as the Hunger Games?

Many of these issues continue to plague the second instalment, which is nonetheless a sturdier, more coherent, better-made film than the first. The movie follows Katniss’ journey after winning the Hunger Games in the first film, as she grapples with her place as a popular culture wunderkind, currying favour with the evil elite while being idolised by the proletariat she once was a part of. She returns to her district and seems to continue living her pre-Hunger Games life, until she is whisked away for a victory tour by the vile President Coriolanus Snow (Donal Sutherland). After Katniss awkwardly plays up a for-show romance with her fellow victor Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) and attending several rallies that almost become spot-fires for a revolution, President Snow in conjunction with the new Gamesmaster Plutarch Heavensbee (Phillip Seymour Hoffman – it seems that, like the Defence against the Dark Arts instructor position at Hogwarts, the position of Gamesmaster is doomed to be vacated by the end of each novel) commissions a new Hunger Games featuring an ‘all-star’ cast of former survivors. Thus, Katniss and Peeta are thrust back into another do-or-die scenario with a range of competitors even more fierce, ruthless and crafty than before.

All of this is done in a decidedly PG manner. While characters do, indeed, die – and die sadistically – blood is rarely seen and the plot moves on quickly without dwelling on the mor(t)al questions afforded by such events.

As far as teen fiction goes, one cannot really fault The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Its characters are broad but defined, and there are even a few twists and turns that, while not revelatory, certainly keep things interesting. Suzanne Collins has not, I don’t think, created a parable on the level of Catch-22, but it seems that her novels contain ideas whose time, for a young segment of the population, has come.