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Given that blind spot, it’s not surprising that The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, like its predecessor, leaves most of the satire and jabs at the audience to implication; instead, most of the story is re-contextualized and re-conceived as a straightforward political thriller, where the final maneuvers by both sides are equivalent to scorching the earth. The focus is on political aggression and velocity, not the somewhat slower one-card-at-a-time chess-game mentality of the book. While this is enough to make the film probably the canniest blockbuster of 2013, there’s no denying that it’s a simpler piece of work.

District 13 seems like an afterthought in the movie; we are given only one clue as to the protagonists’ level of knowledge, and judging by the minute facial tics from Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss when Donald Sutherland’s President Snow name-drops it, that level appears to be total ignorance. The biggest character change from the source novel is Effie Trinket, played by Elizabeth Banks. Her character is more elaborate here, likely to compensate for the absence of three Capitol beauticians from the novel. On the page, these three minor characters served as a gateway to the idea that Capitol citizens owe their manner to having been desensitized by so many years of violence as spectacle, as opposed to being innately uncaring or antagonistic. This manifests itself as simple, blunt emotion on the page, as the beauticians prepare Katniss for the Quarter Quell ceremonies and lose emotional control while doing so. The iteration offered by The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, with Effie giving a short and emotional apology directly to Katniss and Peeta, is arguably more eloquent and more touching.

The movie retains most of the book’s attitude toward violence and death; indeed, turning the satire into something mostly implied emphasizes the humanism on display, and the sequence with Effie is one of three passages in the film that are surprisingly moving. All three, in both book and movie, involve the affirmation of both empathy and grief - but the movie expresses them with more clarity and directness, and there are case studies in each of them of how slight changes in wording and incident from one medium to another can communicate very different levels of urgency.


The Verdict

About a half-hour into The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Katniss delivers a eulogy to the character Rue from the first installment. This eulogy is expressed in rather academic terms in the novel, and much more informally in the film. The depiction of Rue’s family during this sequence is done with a visual pragmatism that’s a little discomfiting, and commendable for it; Rue’s actual death in the first film was pretty sanitized, and the grisliness of it was redirected into a short, safer seed-of-rebellion sequence. And in the novel of Catching Fire, Katniss is moved to eulogize Rue at least partly by the perception that one of the deceased’s siblings is silently imploring her to do so. Here, she faces not Rue’s sister but a giant video image of Rue herself, with her survivors positioned beneath, and the blunt and straightforward way the family is clearly staged for the benefit of a narrative moment gives the setting a ghastliness and sick plausibility that is nearly all by itself more potent than anything thus far in the book (and, for that matter, anything in the first film).

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