Watched: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
This instalment felt vastly superior to the first in the series, which I felt was perfectly entertaining but failed to capture the horror of being forced to kill other children to make someone else’s political point; here, Katniss is already in the throes of the PTSD that (in the novels) rears its head in Mockingjay, and as a result it casts the lead as someone already shaken, often forcing herself to shut down emotionally in order to deal with the latest batch of fresh horrors.
Horror is something that’s really played up here on an existential level - while there are some glimpses of brutal violence, the film does a much better job of driving an axe into the cracks as they begin to show in the slick veneer of the Capitol. It makes the savageness with which the main antagonist acts all the more terrifying, as it comes from an impulse to suppress an already-swelling revolt, rather than (as in the first movie) simply keeping a terrified population in their place.
The only crime this film is culpable of is leaving you wanting more at the end of the (extensive) runtime - I think this probably comes from the fact that the novel similarly ends on an emotionally and narratively ambiguous note, and it means that this very much feels like it was designed to be enjoyed as part of the final quadrilogy that this film will be comprised of, rather than a single part. This feels like quibbling, though - and with director Francis Lawrence signed on for the final two-parter, I can’t help but get excited for the next one.