I freely admit that I'm not one of the people obsessed with The Hunger Games, and not particularly invested in how it's adapted to the screen. I find the whole level of attention devoted to it a bit weird. Though it is example C (or D) in the adaptations of tween novels to the big screen, it seems to be the hardest to explain. Fans of Twilight can quickly sum up the imprtance of it - the romantic triangle of Bella Edward and Jacob - as can the Harry Potter fans - magic, interesting boy and mysterious back story - but what I've found in the past couple of months is that Hunger Games fandom is much less coherent. It's something about the empowered girl and the exicting plot ("I couldn't put it down" seems the most common expression), but beyond that, not exactly clear.
Having seen the filmed result, I can kind of see both the appeal and the incoherence... but generally, I'd call myself underwhelmed. The Hunger Games is a curious bid for a blockbuster - briskly plotted, but also predicatble and a bit dull, overthought and (literally) underfed. Surprisingly didactic - how else can one put allegory and class consciousness onscreen, exactly? - The Hunger Games strikes me as yet another curious tween monstrosity, another "empowerment" tale for girls whose underlying themes are really anything but.
Much of what ails The Hunger Games I'd probably chalk up to a familiar problem with much of fantasy futurist science fiction: the problems really lie with the premise, and how deeply one is willing to invest in the creation of an alernate reality.
The Hunger Games takes place in a vaguely futurisitic quasi-America, where another apparent Civil War resulted in some sort of brokered peace deal that divided the country into 13 "Districts", 12 subsidiaries ruled by a capital district where wealth and power have apparently centralized. And the fiction comes down, literally, to how fully one is prepared to buy into this premise. Finding it skeptical on several levels (point A: the new capital is not a coastal city, but a landlocked valley area in between mountain ranges. This is rarely how national or international capitals work. Example B: it's hard to explain how the 12 subsidiary districts simply came to accept this sort of centralized control, given that they are mineral rich, or farm producers, etc. That's a building block of independence right there), I had a hard time buying much of the film which is built on it.
The 12 subsidiary districts, as a condition of the peace, are required to send two young adults, boy and girl, to an annual contest where only one winner will survive. These are, yes "The Hunger Games" and have some impact on how food is distributed (though the film is especially vague on this connection). As the film starts, a new Games cycle is underway, and the "Reaping", where the children are selected, is the first big moment. The film starts in District 12, the Mining District (meant to represent, none too subtly, Appalachia), and we are introduced to Katniss, a hard scrabbling young woman who helps sustain her family's meager fortunes by bow hunting on forbidden land. When Katiss' younger sister Primrose (the names are uniformly groan inducing) is picked for the female roel, Katniss leaps up to take her place. She and a local boy - Peeta, no really, Peeta - are then whisked away to the Capital for two weeks of preparation and then the Games.
After a futuristic train ride (which called to mind nothing so much as Atlas Shrugged, of all films), the two are deposited into a frenzy of activity of preparation and TV appearances. One of the ancillary points of The Hunger Games is about media distortion and TV reality programming gone mad... which is interesting, but odd, since the story seems curiously agnostic about the stage managing and manufacturing of false drama; it's bad... but also, for the plot, often quite convenient.
Similarly, the film wants to make a murderous competition amongst teens seem shocking.... but it does this, mostly, by putting children in considerable danger and making them into the bad actors in the demise of other kids. My mother has often pointed out to me, especially in horror films, that this use of children as monstrous actors is exploitative and offensive, and I've come to similar conclusions. For all the attempts to try and dress up this kid on kid killing as both allegorical (it's sci-fi!) and extreme so as to make a point... the reality remains that this film has it both ways at once: isn't it terrible that kids are killing kids, hunting each other for sport? And hey... isn't it interesting to find out who wins?
Actually, it's not that interesting to find out who wins, since the series heroine is unlikely to die off in Part One; and her fellow competitors, save for hapless Peeta, are largely ciphers, barely drawn in and given simple motivations and obvious plot filling roles which they do, and die, largely in logical order. Nor is the behind-the-scenes manipulation of the Games all that compelling, since the Capital adults are pretty much uniformly painted as twisted wrongdoers with no moral compass (save for Katniss' mentor Cinnah, the perfect, morally upright black man the world needs right now).
The film, for what is, seems both overlong and a bit thin; brisker editing would have helped in a number of spots, but the Game itself is less enervating than many of these "Human Hunting in the Wild" escapades - Deliverance, for instance, comes to mind as vastly superior in suspense and execution. Moreover the cinematography of the action sequences is done with jerky, handheld cameras which frequently make the action unclear as to who is doing what to whom, and often out of focus. It's an odd, unsatisfying set of moments. The scoring, too, is predictable and dull, but the film could actually use more incidnetal music, rather than long stretches of stiff, uncomfortable silences.
But creatively, the film's biggest flaw is probably in art direction and costume design, where the films "rich vs. poor" obviousness becomes just too much. On the poor side, the depiction of hard conditions and deep poverty rob the characters of a lot of their diginity - it's all dirt and rags and grim greys. On the rich side, the film doesn't just refer to one opulent period, but instead gloms almost all of them onto one another - art deco (ie Nazis) on top of Baroque (Revolutionary France) on top of Late Empire (Napoleonic) on top of Gilded Age until the effect is cartoonishly overdone. It's not just "less is more", it's that this kind of eccentric melange - the kind, most obviously, that John Galliano turned into high art at Dior, for instance - is actually very hard and takes a very precise, knowing eye. Instead, what we get here is all wrong - bad perms, clown makeup, tight, uncomfortable looking dresses and improbable, impractical shoes... and that's not just the girls, it's actors like Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, and Woody Harrelson, too.
Those latter three names give a sense of the overloaded star power careening through this film (add in Donald Sutherland in an inexplicable cameo as President and it's all just too too much), most of them phoning it in for the paycheck (only Harrelson, I'd argue, really finds the center of his role as a former champion turned trainer). Of the yonger leads, I thought Jennifer Lawrence was too old for the part (given that she's already played a much more mature notion of the Katniss part in Winter's Bone), but she actually underplays quite nicely and grounds the steeliness of Katniss in some much needed uncertainty and naivete, though she's largely superheroic and wildly confident. Liam Hemsworth, as the love interest left behind, is colorless. Josh Hutcherson, as Peeta, is charming, but doesn't have all that much to do beyond suffering and looking noble.
I can't entirely knock The Hunger Games as hopeless - as frustrating as it was at times, this is undeniably more fully thought through and precisely plotted than much of what passes for Hollywood Blockbusters of late. And in that, its popularity reflects, most likely, a yearning for better written big budget films, a wish I have as well. Mostly, I suspect, The Hunger Games gives a comfortable perch from which to feel guilty about privilege and plenty without having to do all that much about the people suffering with less. The trilogy, apparently, continues into a revolution by the Districts against the Capital... but like most of the story's plot, these developments are broadly telegraphed in advance and don't feel like they deliver much, ultimately, in emotional payoff, but I'm happy to wait and see.
As empowered and strong as Katniss is, she's hard to root for, distant, overprepared and stoical - oddly, not all that far from Twilight's Bella, minus the disastrous relationship choices and self destructive tendencies. As positives as her strengths are, thematically, The Hunger Games basically posits that the only route out of poverty and hard circumstances is personal confidence, combative skill and mass uprising. I'd like to think the options on all three aren't quite that limited, much the way I think we need more than manufactured, televised drama to make our lives worthwhile. Curious and unsatisfying, The Hunger Gmes isn't so much a disappointment as a puzzling oddity.
Comments