CINEMA Woman in flames

Child warriors and unmitigated violence: you may find it alarming

To return (briefly) to the SF origins of the trilogy. The devastated world in which Katniss and her people struggle may be partly an hallucination. However, distinguishing it from several recurrent plotlines, there are no vampires, werewolves or zombies in sight; no extraterrestrial warlords visiting destruction on our cities; and there is no time travel.

By avoiding these overworked tropes, Catching Fire — as suggested — is in some ways a bitter satire of social directions in America and elsewhere. The great schism between tweens and grown-up idiots has been exacerbated: Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is such as to neatly pivot her on the brink of real stardom (she was in the grim Winter’s Bone).

If so, the millennial generation will have found their true face.

But if you’re not a millennial — nor in sympathy with the Occupy Everything spirit of anarchy that propels a seasoning of rage and revenge — you may find Catching Fire mildly alarming.

Alas, it’s too late to do anything much about the onward sweep of a future in which (as Cormac McCarthy puts it): “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The sweeping water . . . coldly secular. The silence.”

Peter Wilhelm pcwilhelm@telkomsa.net