The Five Hunger Games Movies Before Sunrise on the Reaping, Ranked

Gary Ross’s film gives District 12 a material plainness that the following movies can sometimes seem in too much of a hurry to leave behind. The reaping is a public event with a precise relation to the life that surrounds it. A family knows who is eligible, and the ceremony asks everybody to stand in a place from which they can watch the result. Katniss volunteering for Prim is powerful because Lawrence gives her no more time to make the decision than the situation would allow. All the preparation that follows takes place after a person has already done the thing that will make the Capitol interested in her.

The arena can be visually difficult to read, especially when the camera seeks the violence in brief, disorienting fragments. That strategy has a force of its own. It makes the event less readily consumable as the kind of competition its fictional audience has come to enjoy. The more sustained moments have a different value. Katniss attending to Rue makes the time available to the two characters worth something beyond their positions in the Games. The berries bring the political and the personal together because the people running the contest need a usable image of its outcome. Ross’s film has a complete shape, with a frightening premise that becomes more interesting once a contestant sees one of its rules the organizers cannot easily enforce.

The first Mockingjay moves much of the action into a bunker and risks appearing to put the series on hold. The pause is where Francis Lawrence finds some of its most original material. District 13 needs Katniss to make a case for the rebellion in front of a camera. A prepared speech gives the people in charge something they can approve in advance. It leaves Katniss with almost nothing she has a personal reason to say. The failure of that arrangement is funny because the production around her has done a great deal of work to manufacture a kind of sincerity she can supply much more readily when they stop telling her how it ought to sound.

The District 8 hospital changes the terms of the job. Katniss arrives among people with existing reasons to watch her, and the attack puts those reasons in direct contact with the camera crew’s work. Her anger has a source everybody present has had to reckon with before it becomes useful footage. The film has the patience to show why the resulting image can persuade and why the people who need it will still want to decide how to use it. Peeta’s broadcasts make the distinction more painful. The person Katniss is watching has an immediate claim on her that the people interpreting the broadcast can only partly share. The movie ends with plenty left to resolve, but its main subject has had room to develop. It earns second place for taking the time to ask how a rebellion uses a person whose ability to move an audience exceeds her control over the movement.

The Victory Tour gives Catching Fire the series’ richest starting point. Katniss and Peeta have survived and have to appear grateful for a system that has obliged them to revisit the people whose children did not come home. Josh Hutcherson is particularly effective when Peeta knows the form an appearance is supposed to take and finds it harder to let the form determine what he will do. In District 11, the memory of Rue changes what it means for Katniss to address an audience. There is a difference between carrying a public image into a room and discovering that the people waiting there have made something of it themselves.

The Quarter Quell carries that uncertainty into the arena. These contestants bring histories of surviving the same institution and have reasons to know how a group of victors could look to the audience outside. The clock structure gives a large action sequence something the series sometimes struggles to supply, a geography the audience can learn at roughly the pace of the people in it. The alliances keep the mechanics from being the whole pleasure. Katniss can find a use for somebody’s knowledge while remaining unsure what that person expects her to do with it. The movie can therefore clarify the physical danger without settling its most interesting relationships.

Catching Fire has the strongest union of the spectacle the franchise can provide and the judgment it asks the spectator to exercise. The clothes, interviews and arena are persuasive entertainments with purposes a character can sometimes redirect. Even the largest reversals depend on how a person understands who is watching. Lawrence gives Katniss a new position every time the scale of the audience changes. By the end, the events we watched as a contest have become evidence of an arrangement the Capitol never intended us to see.