Monday, March 10, 2014

At The (Home) Cinema: Hunger Games II

     Last night, I watched the second Hunger Games film -- Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

     Like the previous film, it's one of the better jobs of taking a book to the screen I've yet seen.  At two and a half hours(!), there's enough time to tell the story; excellent casting, good acting, a decent script and seamless effects and photography manage to tell it well.

     FYI: this film is notably free of the "shaky-cam" found in the first one.  There's evidence the (different) director was, ahem, very strongly advised to find himself a boom.

     The arena characters were never going to be easy to cast or simple to play but they all did it.  Mags, Finnick and Johanna Mason were especially good and Beetee and Wiress were outstanding.  The players all appeared to have either done their homework (as in, read the book), responded to well-informed directing, or both.

     It's a fine film, with wide appeal -- who doesn't root for the underdog against the overly-powerful?  -- and I look forward to the next two in the series.

     Some of the fun of these films has been comparing the look of them to the world of my imagination from the books.  It's not the same but it works.  I can't say that of most movies I saw having already read the book.

3 comments:

Wayne Conrad said...

I would like to say I saw the first Hunger Games, but the camera never stood still long enough for me to actually _see_ anything. Is the second film better, in that regard?

Roberta X said...

You'll like it much more: they found a boom. They made use of rails. There may be some hand-held work in this one but if so, somebody figured out what the "on" switch of the SteadiCam was for.

Rob K said...

The Hunger Games movies are unique in having replaced my mental picture of what I read in the books. I've never had that happen before.