Reviews In the Nick of Time: Hunger Games

I actually went to see a movie on its opening weekend! This almost never happens.  I should probably get a check-up.

Hunger Games was, miraculously, a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the book.  (Is it possible that Hollywood has learned that if you adapt a book with millions of rabid followers, and you actually make a film of the book, you will make potloads of money?  As f’rinstance Harry Potter, Twilight, Game of Thrones?  Naaaah, never happen.)

It’s pointless to approach this film, or the book, logically.  The society depicted doesn’t make a lot of sense— you have a vast capital city, afloat in luxury, amazingly advanced technology, and Astoundingly Bad Hair, and it’s supported by the labors of twelve modest-sized towns?  Eeh, I don’t think so.

But then the movie isn’t aimed at your brain, it’s aimed at your viscera.  YA science fiction and fantasy doesn’t do the sort of rigorous worldbuilding that adult fantastic fiction is supposed to do (but usually doesn’t).  Instead YA runs like a speeding freight train straight at your emotions.

Here we have a society where a twelve-year-old girl can be hacked to pieces by a gang of eighteen-year-old males armed with primitive weapons, and it’s put on TV for the purposes of entertainment.  Wrap your logic around that, Mr. Spock.

The plot is a mashup of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, Battle Royale,  and a gladiator movie.  Each of the twelve outlying districts is required every year to send two teenagers to the capital, where they’re all made to fight each other to the death in a grand melee that can go on for days.   The intention, as the President point out, is to terrify the population, but still leave them with a smidgen of hope.

The capital features neoclassical architecture reminiscent of ancient Rome (or at least Mussolini), and characters with names like Caesar, Cato, Claudius, and Cinna (and that’s just the C’s).  The gladiators enter on chariots.  The name of the country is even Panem, as in Panem et Circenses.

Yeah, I think we get the point.

Our heroine Katniss comes from an Appalachia right out of the Depression photographs of Dorothea Lange, and when she arrives at the capital, her problem (aside from having to be the last person standing out of the twenty-four who start) is that she’s too compulsively honest for the jaded denizens of the capital.  She’s a genuine heroine, but the viewers want her to be a TV action star.  So she has to learn to fake it while fighting for real.

I’m not sure how much of this would come across to someone who hadn’t read the book.  Take, for example, her relationship with her fellow sacrifice, Peeta.  He’s in love with her . . . or so he says (on TV).  She’s not in love with him, but if she convincingly fakes an attachment, the both of them may be rewarded with items that will help them survive.  Jennifer Lawrence is very good at negotiating the ambiguities of her character, but I wonder how much of it would be understandable to someone unfamiliar with the source material.

The one character I wanted to see more of was Haymitch, played by Woody Harrelson.  Haymitch is the last person from District 12 to win the Hunger Games, and it’s his job to mentor each new pair of sacrifices.  He’s an alcoholic, and in the book the source of his pain is clear: every year he meets two new young people, trains them, and then watches them die horribly.  In the movie, he’s mostly an eccentric comic character.

Which brings us to the matter of gore.  The book is filled with graphic descriptions of violence.  The filmmakers, however, wanted to keep their core audience of teens and preteens, and an R rating wasn’t going to do that.  So to keep a PG-13 rating, the film avoids a Battle Royale-style tsunami of blood and viscera.

Not that it still isn’t grim and violent.  But a combination of shaky-cam and fast cutting keeps the entrails at arm’s length, while still getting across the fact that children are being made to kill other children.

And that shaky-cam?  I hate it.  Do not see this film if you’re prone to motion sickness.  The camera shakes so much and so often that it begins to seem like laziness.  What, they can’t afford a steadicam?

And the shakes and fast cuts happen even when they’re unnecessary.  For one thing I failed to catch the clever thing that Katniss did at the end to rescue her not-boyfriend.  I must have blinked and missed it.  Or it was very dark.  Or something.  But I’m sure it was clever, whatever it was.

Hunger Games.  Well-made, well-acted, faithful to the source material.

If you want two hours of grim, PG-13 slaughter, you could do far worse.