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The Hunger Games

★★★★★

Directed by: Gary Ross

Written by: Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray

Based on the Novel by: Suzanne Collins

I read Suzanne Collins’s trilogy early last year after hearing about them from an article decrying the violence and depravity depicted in them as evidence of our eroding moral character. “This is in a book meant for teens!” I found it ironic that the won’t-somone-think-of-the-children line was what lured me in, considering my biggest complaint with the first book was that it didn’t do a good enough job of explaining how a society could ever allow a contest like The Hunger Games to exist. To willfully sacrifice children in this way, to have an elite class so detuned and desensitized as to find sport in the brutal carnage televised for all to see, stretched my suspension of disbelief enough that I forgave Collins’s book only because its strengths of plotting and social commentary and characterization were strong enough to overcome what I felt was a sort of obvious exaggeration.

Eventually, in the sequel, Collins manages to rectify the situation by detailing that this is not a uniformly accepted occurrence and that there are morally outraged people in the fictional country of Panem who fight against the oppressive regime of The Capitol. By the time I finished that book, I was loving The Hunger Games trilogy and shortly after that I found out they were filming adaptations of the books. I knew that I had to see what they could do with the story on the big screen.

The plot of The Hunger Games is that each of the 12 districts in Panem, once per year, must send one male and one female tribute, aged 12 to 18, to compete in a last-man-standing fight to the death. The Games are a punishment of sorts for a historical rebellion that took place some 74 years before the events in the story. These twenty-four tributes are selected randomly from a hat. Katniss Everdeen (played magnificently by Jennifer Lawrence) is a sixteen year-old from the poorest district in the land, and the sole provider for her younger sister Prim and her mother. Her father was killed in a mining accident and the shock broke her mother down until she was unable to provide, forcing Katniss to step up. She hunts with her friend and partner, Gale, illegally sneaking outside the district boundaries to catch game to eat or sell or trade for the necessities of life. Prim, now twelve, is entering her first Reaping, where the tributes are selected. Names are entered once per year so Prim with only one name in the bowl is a long odds choice, but of course she is selected. Katniss knows her sister is too sensitive, too timid to survive. Rather than see her die, Katniss volunteers to take her place in the Hunger Games. The male tribute is Peeta, a baker’s son who has a tie in his past to Katniss.

The two are whisked to the Capitol where they begin training with the one tribute from District 12 who has ever won the Games, a drunk by the name of Haymitch (Woody Harrelson, playing the part with a confident teeter), who serves as their mentor. During the pageantry of the lead-up to the Games, Katniss becomes an odds favorite to win and Peeta expresses publicly that he is in love with Katniss, an unfortunate event since the Games can have only one victor which means one or both of them will end up dead.

Okay, so disbelief aside, I knew going in that as long as they didn’t make any ridiculous changes, the plot was going to be great because the source material is excellent. The question for this movie was whether they were going to be able to capture enough of the spirit of the book and convey the tone of Katniss’s character, especially considering the books take place entirely from her perspective. The good news is, they basically nailed it on all counts. This is a movie that is incredibly close the source material, with plenty of details that fans of the book would have cried out if they had been missing. The relatively few changes that appear are either understandable (Katniss and most of the other high-district tributes appear to be much better fed than they are portrayed in the book, but these are actual human actors who had very physically demanding roles where skin and bones simply wouldn’t have worked) or actually welcome (a sequence that takes place outside of Katniss’s knowledge during the course of the Games and is revealed in book two is very welcome here to cement that sense of outrage I mentioned was missing from the first book). There are a couple of bits and pieces that might have been done a tiny bit better, such as the interactions at the very end which don’t always portray the heavy conflict of emotions that are palpable in the novel and the connection between Peeta and Katniss isn’t really given the gravity in the film that the book affords it.

Still, as a fan of the book I can’t say I walked away the least bit disappointed in the movie. Which means the only real consideration for it was how well it would do for those who hadn’t read the books. My wife went with me and in spite of me pestering her to read the books since I put them down, she never got around to them prior to watching the movie. I was happy to find then that having seen it, she was just as excited by it as I was and upon arriving home, almost immediately asked to see my Kindle so she could begin reading book two. To that end, I’d say mission accomplished for The Hunger Games. It’s a triumph. Go see it.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — March 25, 2012 at 05:49PM