So I was expecting that there would be a direct cause and effect—electric shocks? Lange: The hexagons themselves seemed kind of hokey. Television Without Pity used to sell a t-shirt that read "70s sci-fi was all about hexagons. Last time around, we were struck by the extreme geometry of the Cornucopia, a classic idea pushed appropriately into a lethal, angular form—meant to house weapons, not pumpkins—with references to the work of Frank Gehry and Greg Lynn.
But why not iterate? This year's cornucopia was like the last, but with more angles added, and it wasn't put to use. It isn't on its shear walls that tributes die, but on the rocks below. Those rocks looked like the fake boulders that we use to keep the apes in their habitats at zoos nowadays. That parallel could have had some resonance had they been used the same way.
But no. It's the technology under the rocks, in the trees, in the sky that make the arena lethal. But the movie, boringly, chose to hide that technology.
Why not let the sets do the talking? Riechers: The Arena did have a diorama-like quality. But I, too, wondered why the technology was so hidden. Imagine having to learn how to use a brand-new interface or some never-before-seen gadget in the heat of battle when the stakes are life and death. Tech frustration is something everyone watching the movie could relate to. So that larger audience felt largely absent, almost as if they didn't care about the Games anymore, themselves, or weren't watching.
Like the last few seasons of American Idol : The excitement is gone, no one tunes in, who cares. Lange: I agree Catching Fire rushed past a lot of tension-producing elements that were important in the first film: getting the right gear from the Cornucopia, learning how to use it, even the special dispatches from the sponsors.
Catching Fire essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. Remember me. Forgot your password? Buy Study Guide. The novel is set in various locations in the fictional country of Panem.
The climax of the novel is when Katniss blows up the Games arena with her arrow. The people living in the Capitol city are unbelievably rich, and relatively shallow-minded, but those living in District Twelve are starving and desolate. In some areas, incredible technology such as invisible force fields and high-speed trains are developed, and in others, water is still obtained from a well pump. The stark contrasts are nearly parallel with those in many countries today.
Civilians are publicly whipped and shot, and the President is a heartless man. These almost unimaginable situations are completely different from those in our society today. The distinct ability for readers to relate with some components and be distanced with others combines to make dystopian fiction truly enthralling. The point? Shenzhen Daily E-mail:szdaily szszd.
Tech and Vogue. And it would teach us how to avoid toying with those temptations. When all else is twisted in these dystopias, love remains. Katniss and her sister Prim. Ender and his sister Valentine. To save their beloved sisters, Katniss and Ender fight and suffer and survive for them. In another contemporary and controversial dystopia, Lois Lowry's Newbery winner The Giver , the young protagonist Jonas catches a glimpse of hope if love did exist: "Things could be different.
I don't know how, but there must be some way for things to be different. Ender's memory of his mother's secret prayer is "a memory of holiness," the book tells us, "of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear.
Even dystopias, at least the best ones, keep alive the memory of that kind of holiness, and love. Elissa Cooper is an assistant editor at CT. She is earning a master's degree in library and information science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Have something to add about this?
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