介绍:
When I was young and ignorant, I could never figure out why adults so often failed to understand their younglings. I mean, they've all had their youthful years and must surely be able to recall how their own adolescent minds once worked. But the truth is, as years pass, I find myself losing the ability to process teenage fun. This revelation dawned on me after the screening of "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire."
It was a Friday night in a fully packed cineplex. As the closing credits emerged, half a dozen teenage girls behind me burst out with frenetic exclamation. I was totally startled because, although director Francis Lawrence's sequel is a great improvement from the first installment, it still carries pretty obvious defects. All I could remember at that point was the frequent exchange of looks of impatience with my friend.
The story in Catching Fire is pretty predictable even for those who haven't read the original work by Suzanne Collins. Of course, the lead characters will eventually end up in the arena of another Hunger Games, after some twists and turns. But it is exactly those twists and turns in the new piece that my friends and I found difficult to digest.
The movie begins with the winners at home coping with their love triangle. Then, all of a sudden, they are sent on a tour around the 12 districts. In the place of a preparation for the audience to warm up to the plot, we have the President paying Everdeen a visit and dropping some menacing words to confuse things up even further. Then, during the tour, the audience is finally allowed to catch a glimpse on the Capitol's totalitarian reign and the signs of resistance: a backgrounder, which could totally have been laid in the first installment.
Now, due to the failure of the first piece, this transitional episode has to devote most of its screen time to complete what was missing in its forerunner; consequently, the actual Hunger Game lasts too briefly before the movie comes to an abrupt end.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is an intellectually challenging films, not in the sense that it is smart, but because viewers needs to make a conscious effort to connect the dots and fill in the gaps with imagination. Any thoughtful adults in their right mind would be annoyed by that process, but the teenagers probably love it because they haven't developed the habit of examining their own thoughts and the costumes are cool enough as a distraction.
Despite Jennifer Lawrence's improved acting skills, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire deserves a three out of ten.
