New Catching Fire Trailer and Posters

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Of all the books, Catching Fire is my favorite, so I'm almost vibrating with excitement over the release of a new trailer yesterday at San Diego Comic Con, and the chance to see our named victors in their arena costumes.

Some thoughts I had watching the new trailer:

* The Victor's Village is smaller than I expected, and the houses are much grander than I imagined. Kind of a McMansion development that didn't think hard enough about green space. So, from that perspective, it probably is the Village the Capitol would build.

* The scenes of the Hob burning are very dramatic! What's just an off-screen moment in the book is going to be a very dramatic sequence. I love that the film adaptation gives us the chance to see things outside of Katniss's perspective, and I'm really looking forward to more of these moments.

* That shot of the crowd surging forward during the tour (at 0:53)... is that District 3? Oh, please, let it be so! (Alternately, I'm guessing it's District 5, which I would also not mind seeing.)

* Is it just my imagination, or do the shots of the Capitol look bigger and broader than those used in The Hunger Games? I don't expect Catching Fire has a substantially bigger budget (I think Lionsgate expected THG to be a hit and funded accordingly), so I'm not sure why that would be.

* The look between Effie and Katniss at 1:16 is exquisite.

* OMG, the interview set! Am I the only one tortured by the fact that all the victors are there, but the screen size/resolution is too small to get real detail? (Why does District 6 look like they've escaped from the Matrix?)

* The actresses playing Enobaria and Johanna look fantastic. Not quite what I imagined (I pictured Enobaria with darker skin and a buzzcut), but true threats.

* Following Katniss's lift out of the stockyard into the arena could not be more breathtaking.

The victor posters were originally distributed separately to various websites, but Empire Online has posted all of them. The casting of District 3 is particularly important to me (headcanon, I haz it). I am really pleased with the choice of accomplished character actors Amanda Plummer and Jeffrey Wright as Wiress and Beetee. Plummer seems especially right to me, given the niche she's carved out for herself playing the tiny, soft-spoken women with the crazy eyes (if you have the opportunity, check out her Emmy-winning guest shot on The Outer Limits, "A Stitch in Time").

Comments

Re: District Three Headcanon, Part the First

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I'd say that's a pretty strong hint that it's well off enough. Especially given that after the Dark Days they no longer had D13's sekrit nuclear power, so suddenly D5 would've gotten a bit jump.

I buy that. Power is the most immediate and fundamental of the Capitol's needs. Food can be stockpiled, but it's a lot harder to store power. That has to buy some leverage.

if you want to play to type, a district full of engineering nerds doesn't need fresh veggies or want anything that requires too much cooking. ;) Just give us ramen, please.

I hadn't thought of that, but what the heck, that does sound about right; all D3 really needs is a healthy supply of Twizzlers and Red Bull. :D

CLASS DIVIDES YES LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT, I see that the most in D1 randomly, between the ones who make the pretty things and the ones who do the mining, but I think D3 would have a pretty sharp intellectual divide on top of that. You'd have engineers who look down on the menial jobs and then a kind of anti-intellectualism from the ones who actually do the grunt-work. Not enough to be hugely divisive, but enough to stem any attempts at rebellion for a good long time.

That's about the way I'm picturing it. I think there's some simmering resentment among the laborer class, principally based on the better wages and (apparently, though it may in some circumstances be debatable) better hours/conditions that the scientist class have. In my headcanon, after individuals have solidified their status (generally, by the time they're in college/grad school), scientist class members have a greater range of options for work, and there's actual competitive recruitment among privately and government-owned companies and academia to lure/retain them. There are also probably more people who could be doing scientific or middle management support work than there are positions to accommodate them, so for at least some portion of the population I'm thinking there's also the soul-deadening discomfort that comes with that. On the part of the scientists, I'm thinking that there's probably some hubris (and it doesn't help that many of them may be less socially skilled).

As you say, I don't think this would be enough to keep them from eventually banding together against the Capitol, but I think this system could result in a bit of distrust between the classes; they may not coordinate their efforts well, initially. I also think the system could be rough on families; I can imagine a lot of resentment where one sibling is suddenly singled out for special attention and eventually able to move up a step in quality of life, and conversely, how lost and alone a sibling who 'doesn't cut it' must feel when s/he is not able to meet expectations and suffers a diminution in prospects.