The Hunger Games

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'.