Taika Waititi tells us a lot about Ricky Baker in the opening of Hunt for the Wilderpeople without a peep from his mouth. A police car rolls through the hills to a choral musical backing. When he steps out from the vehicle, we get a glimpse of the Illuminati-inspired motto on the jacket back, and the soundtrack acknowledges it with an alien twang. Ricky is spoken for on behalf of welfare officer Paula, who immediately labels him a lost cause in a montage of his criminal activities (the lengthy rap sheet includes throwing rocks, kicking stuff, defacing stuff and lots of other heinous stuff). "He's a real piece of work," she proclaims. Ricky inspects the place quickly, and then wordlessly returns to the police car. This, and other various markers throughout the film, say a lot about how he has been bounced around foster parents all his life. He doesn't even rate himself lasting the day here - might as well get onto the next 'home'.
But this couple do want him. Well, half of them do. In a wonderfully affectionate performance lasting all of twenty minutes, Rima Te Wiata crafts a character of great warmth and wit who seems to be able to do it all; the only thing she's missing is a child to pass it along to. Aunt Bella, like most of Waititi's characters, is a hyper-caricature with a good heart; she's thoughtful enough to leave both a sharp knife to kill monsters in the night as well as a hottie to keep Ricky warm. She relays this through the door because she has an inkling of what a good mother's qualities are, having envisioned this her whole life, and tries to respect his boundaries. Yet she is so excited she peaks around the door anyway, if only to make sure that he hasn't vanished on the spot. In the morning she urges him to at least have breakfast before he runs away. She's at once honest and revealing, and under no illusions of what Ricky has gone through. Her birthday rendition of what has to be a self-written ode to "good as gold" Ricky on a little toy piano is as heartwarming as a big gulp of hot soup on a rainy day. Has Paula ever told Ricky he has value? Has anyone?
But then a thunderclap of a curveball hits them, and the film descends into the well-treaded material promised in the trailer: the formidable team of cantankerous old Hec and the chubby, impressionable Ricky on an adventure for the ages. The story is doled out in chapters unveiled in white, curly text giving the impression of a storybook come to life. Each frame Ricky stumbles across in his oversized hoodies are filled to the brim with character and attitude; see how Waititi overlays several Rickys in the same shot to simulate the fact that he is lost, how he contemplates rationing then scarfs down the rest of his food, or how he manages to start a fire but is not cooking wild game, but trying to heat his hottie. Ricky is one of those twenty-first century children who communicate extensively through their knowledge of pop culture, and like the hazy, dreamlike visions of Michael Jackson in Waititi's Boy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople also freely indulges him. His introduction to the bloodshed of the bush is a thudding Psycho-inspired montage that zooms right up into his squished, horrified face. When he is first called upon to wield a gun to potentially save his uncle, action music pumps into our ears before the recoil unceremoniously drops him. If he was old enough he'd declare himself Clyde and old gruffy Hec Bonnie. What these also reveal is the self-soothing nature of Waititi's characters, and how Ricky has fashioned himself a defense mechanism; he can conjure music at will, and the fact that there's nothing around but sticks and leaves has never stopped him.
Locals will fondly remember Julian from Waititi's anti drug-driving commercial in 2013, which itself took from his short film Two Cars, One Night. Both contemplate the uncanny ability of children being able to apply their own humour and logic to darker and more uncomfortable situations, revealing the flip side of parental negligence. Ricky doesn't even get to have that experience. His dialogue unconsciously reveals the pains of his upbringing, and how he recycles the positive mantras that have been beaten into him: "Okay Debbie Downer, let's write a haiku." Paula's escalation in her attempts to recapture him hint at the self-fulfilling prophecy that she anoints each foster kid. At first he's a real bad egg, but by the climax they're being cornered by tanks and SWAT squadrons as if they were international criminals. It's a stigma that grows exponentially. Her self-stylised motto 'no child left behind' initially seems heartwarming, but becomes more sinister with each iteration; she's not so much concerned with his wellbeing as she is with making sure there is another foster family lined up. Ricky never stood a chance.
The Hunger Games a futuristic oppressive upper class society sets 24 children in a battle to fight against each other to the death every year. There are 12 districts and each district randomly selects one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 as tributes to enter the Hunger Games as a way to keep the districts in check and keep any signs of uprising at bay. The strong, sure-footed hunter, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), in a first of its kind, volunteers to be a tribute in place of her little sister in the games.
The huge success of "The Hunger Games" should be attributed to the awesome marketing and the apparent title of being the next "Twilight" when it comes to its money making ability in the teen-fantasy genre. The camera-work is just fine, save for the jerk motions when somebody is being killed. You won't feel any nausea if you are used to Greengrass's style of cinematography. The acting from Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Elizabeth Banks and Josh Hutcherson were great. Where the movie falls apart is in the second act when the contestants are inside the arena. Say what you may, at least "Battle Royale" provided a highly definitive motive for the kids to become killers, didn't glorify the regime and didn't hold back. Of course, since this movie is PG-13, there's relatively no bloodshed on screen and I can overlook that aspect. What kept nagging me throughout the whole movie is, the kids in "The Hunger Games" have no motive to kill each other! Sure somebody should win. But it never explains why they would pick up arms and go kill someone instead of letting nature run its course as Woody Harrelson's Haymitch Abernathy character explained earlier.
The only ones with any kind of character development are Katniss and Peeta. All the others, save for the little black girl and Isabelle Fuhrman barely get to talk in the movie. We have the standard white hunk and his gang of cliché cronies who are the 'villains' and must be brought down. They smirk and take pleasure in killing others while our leads don't get their hands dirty, at all. Peeta, as far as we could see doesn't kill anybody while Katniss killed one guy in self defense trying to save the little black girl. Even the main 'villain' is killed off by cgi animals instead of our leads. So by the end of the movie, our leads are relatively guilt free and their actions in the arena doesn't affect them much. Also they never showed any of the parents being affected by watching their children kill others or being killed brutally.
For a movie where 'hunger' is the main context, the children who come from ravaged, starved homes seem to adapt to the rich lifestyles quite quickly and they are barely starved even during the games. The social commentary completely fails in every aspect. Here we have a world that is like ours, which attempts to market every atrocious thing in a shiny package for the audiences. It was just touched upon and I felt like the writers were afraid of exploiting that storyline. They wanted to tell the story of a totalitarian regime, but ended up ditching it in favor of pleasing the masses. For all its talk of female empowerment, the movie panders to the audience who love Gale/Peeta including cheesy scenes which never come off as true. The Katniss we grew up liking in the movie wouldn't have kissed Peeta at that moment, unless of course it was a ploy to make the 'star-crossed lovers' notion work for the sponsors in the movie, which was never quite clear.
I was in fact, highly excited to see "The Hunger Games". But in its attempt to appease the masses and thereby glossing over the disturbing (yet intriguing) social commentary, "The Hunger Games" does the most heinous act any movie could do. The system which we are supposed to loathe and be disgusted by, is cheered and celebrated by the movie by virtue of making the deaths of the children in the games inconsequential by making them caricatures and inserting a convoluted love story even in the most vicarious of situations, set to pander to the teens who will go weak in the knees and forget about the immoral world this movie is actually set in. By refusing to look directly at its own story and by instead fashioning a convenient morality out of its murderous sporting event, it lets the audience off the hook and even encourages them to enjoy the blood-sport as 'entertainment'.