The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

You're gonna put your eye out with that arrow.

by Preston Sinclair

 

"Remember who the real enemy is." 
            Haymitch 

 As a fan of post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction I must say that this young adult version rates right up there with Ayn Rand's Anthem, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. There's an earnestness and brutality about Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of Katniss to which we can all relate. The fight or flight syndrome that kicks in with all of us at some time or another. 
     The art of good story telling allows the reader to insert one's self into the story; i.e. to ask, 'What would I do in that situation?'  The most disturbing thing about the original Hunger Games was that it was about children killing children. Catching Fire skirts around that issue by pitting veteran Hunger Games winners against each other as adults.  Was this just a clever plot twist, or a bow to the reality of the world in which we live where children really do kill children?
     I remember growing up with my cousins and friends. We used to play this game called War. We'd go into the woods and find sticks that resembled rifles. Then we'd all go out into the field and pretend to be snipers and pick each other off one by one, a pre-hunger games right of passage one might say.  It was all in good adolescent fun and no one ever got hurt. Yet I remember my aunt standing on the doorsteps yelling after us as we marched off to war, "You boys are gonna put an eye out with those sticks."

   I cannot in good conscience post my thoughts about this movie without paying my respects to the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. This is one of those moments when I remember exactly where I was when I heard that he had passed away. I was standing in line at my local convenience store when I glanced over at the news stand and saw his picture on the cover of the New York Post.  At first I thought, "Oh cool, an interview." And then my heart dropped when I read the headline.  Rest in peace my friend.
     Phillip Seymour Hoffman played Plutarch Heavensbee with exactly the right amount of duplicity.  He was a good guy pretending to be a bad guy. He had to make President Snow (Donald Sutherland), believe his every word. No easy task, yet he pulled it off with panache.

Spoiler Alert:

     I realize that some people may not have seen the movie or read the book yet, therefore I have created a special page about the ending which is my favorite part. Here's the link to The Catching Fire Spoiler Page.

     Here's my review of the book on Goodreads.com.

 Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins


By the time I was about a third of the way through this book the story had me hooked, yet the only problem I have was that the weak vocabulary sometimes took me out of the story. I stopped and thought to myself, 'there may have been a better word for that.' I quickly told myself that this is a Young Adult book. Also the narrator Katniss is a sixteen year old with a limited education. The story really works best when there is movement. Katniss is either running away from something, or running to something. After I read the pivotal chapter which described how the Third Quarter Quell would be played (I won't spoil it), I had an A-ha moment when realized that I'd had a feeling that this would happen, but I didn't know how it would happen. Suzanne Collins deals with themes that adults can relate to without the language, and without the sex, which is very refreshing.
      Well, I finished reading it last night. I was beginning to worry because the games had not started, and I was almost two thirds of the way through the book. Soon after I started reading Part III The Enemy, I realized that this was not going to be about how people died, but how they survived. After that it became a whole new story to me. I could stop and take a breath and enjoy the book. It must have become tiring to think up new ways for people to die, because Collins abruptly stopped doing it. We still don't know how several of the segments of the clock worked, or how many of the Victors even met their end. This is because Collins was gearing up for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.
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