The Hunger Games: Catching Fire owns the all-time November opening record for a film. When it was released in 2013, there was a big buzz around the movie, with die-hard fans of the book standing in line for days at a time to make sure they could get tickets for the premiere.
Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire is considered by most fans (including myself) to be the best book in the series by a long shot. Catching Fire features more layers, more story and more character development than any other book in the trilogy; of course, it is expected that the movie will be able to portray these developments correctly.
Overall, director Francis Lawrence (with no family ties to Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss Everdeen in the franchise), did a good job creating a movie that turned out to be more complex than a viewer would assume at first sight.
But not everything worked out for the book’s biggest fans. The movie featured a very slow beginning, with barely any action at all until the thirty-minute mark. Once the action starts, it revolves mainly around President Snow, and although he is for sure the greatest villain in the movie, he’s not the only one; all the others should’ve gotten more attention too. Probably the biggest flaw of the movie was that it had to stick to a PG-13 rating, which left us without some of the most popular–and often disturbing–scenes from the book, such as a rain of blood that drowns several participants of the Hunger Games (yikes).
These things don’t necessarily make this a bad movie, but it does make it different from every other young adult film adaptation out there.
If you’ve read this series, what else would you have asked of Catching Fire?
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