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 Bad
times, everywhere, that’s what surrounds the world of young Katniss
Everdeen, resident of District 12 of a country called Panem. District
12 is an impoverished, coal-mining province where its citizens can just
as easily die of starvation as accidents in the mines, like the one that
took away Katniss’ dad. Katniss is very much the head of the household,
looking after her little sister, Primrose by illegally hunting in the
nearby forests with best bud, Gale, and selling the poached goods to the
townsfolk. Protective as she is about her sibling, Katniss can’t ease
Prim’s nightmares about her first induction into The Hunger Games, the
government’s annual televised slaughter of a handful of its young
people. For seventy years, Panem has memorialised the failed uprising
of its poorer classes with a lottery that chooses a boy and girl between
the ages of twelve and eighteen from each of its dozen districts to
serve as a “Tribute” and fight each other to the death until one is left
alive. Prim’s dreams become a fateful reality when her name is chosen
and Katniss immediately volunteers to take the twelve year-old’s place.
Alongside Katniss on the road to The Capitol, the heart of Panem where
the Games take place is Peeta, son of the local baker and the pair are
dazzled by the opulence and frivolity of the big city all around them.
Coming from one of the poorest districts, neither Katniss nor Peeta is
considered likely to win, so they must also learn to woo the public into
loving them to improve their chances of sponsorship and thereby increase
their likelihood of survival. They not only have to fight for their
lives in the Hunger Games, but must also turn themselves into media
darlings. In their predicament, Katniss isn’t sure how to regard the
boy who once saved her life when she was starving, or if anything Peeta
says during the Games is true, including his confession of love for the
girl he must kill to survive.
Small
history lesson: There was once a film made in Japan called Battle Royale.
Based on a 1999 novel by Koushun Takami and produced the following
year, the movie, a litany of teenage violence and human degradation was
controversial even by Japanese standards. It never had a proper release
in the United States, yet somehow developed a tremendous fan following
in the West. Taking place in the near future, Battle Royale was the
story of the Japanese government’s solution to out-of-control juvenile
delinquency, which entailed randomly selecting a class of high
schoolers, transporting them to an island full of surveillance cameras
and booby traps and having them slay each other with various weapons
until one was left standing. No surprise if this sounds similar to the
synopsis I typed above; The Hunger Games is a sanitised version of
Battle Royale, taking its shocking premise of children killing children
in a government-mandated gladiator game televised for entertainment and
intimidation. The honey on the bitter, plot-lifting pill is The Hunger
Games’ injection of a healthy dose of Twilight-style, Mary-Sue romance.
It’s also very intentionally PG-13, so as not to frighten off the
predominantly female fans of Suzanne Collins’ original novel. The
violence is abstract and softened by crazy camerawork and the scary
factor is at a minimum. Even so, the grown women all around me in the
cinema gasped loudly and looked about to faint at the very idea of
anyone getting so much as a sidewalk burn. This is how The Hunger Games
has been able to get away without people crying loudly about its Battle
Royale – ripoffness, by playing to an audience that will never have
heard of the earlier film, though one can throw a little of Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s futuristic 1987 gladiator flick, The Running Man, into
the Games equation, as well.
On its
own merits, one thing I can say for The Hunger Games is that it will
probably be one of the most successful action films for girls there’s
yet been. So popular was the 2008 book, that ladies who might never
have gone to a movie like this otherwise, will see it multiple times
regardless of the body count. Besides muffling the brutality with
seizure-inducing shakycam and prohibitive angles, a few of the deaths
described in the book are not shown onscreen. There’s a lot of
information to be crammed into The Hunger Games and there are definite
shortcuts despite the nearly two-and-a-half hour running time. What’s
missing is a lot of character development; the enormity of Peeta’s
giving bread to a starving Katniss is diminished and so is the
complexity of her feelings toward him. We only get glimpses of Gale,
Katniss’ longtime hunting buddy and possible love interest, who only
gets about eight minutes total screen time. The script also fails to
capture some of the humour of the book, particularly the sparring
matches between prissy Hunger Games escort, Effie Trinket, and
perpetually-inebriated previous Games survivor, Haymitch Abernathy,
played respectively by an unrecognisable Elizabeth Banks made up like
Vivienne Westwood at a Kabuki play, and Woody Harrelson under a scraggly
blonde wig. There is the unintentionally funny casting of Lenny Kravitz
as Cinna, the stylist who molds Katniss into the sweetheart of the
Games. True, he sports some subtle gold eyeshadow (which I’m sure is
old hat to the stylish pop star) that I’m sure is meant to denote
some type of actual character, but in action, look and delivery, he is
never not “Lenny Kravitz.” There’s a flatness to the film that doesn’t
curse it to oblivion, but makes one wonder why they didn’t give it more
oomph; go bigger? The production values were surprisingly cheap and
unimpressive. Everything that wasn’t shot in the outdoors looked
terribly fake. We’re supposed to be awed by the majesty of The Capitol,
but the sections that didn’t look like a matte background painting or a
computer-created one, seemed like a shabby studio set. It’s impossible
to get lost in the world. Even the outdoor woodland scenes put one in
the mind of rejected Twilight film locations. The Hunger Games Tributes
must also battle creatures inserted into the playing field by the show’s
director, including doglike beasts called “Muttations.” These critters
couldn’t have looked less realistic if this movie had been made in 1982
instead of 2012. Also, if they were CGI programmes put into play by the
producers, how can they cause any actual harm? In the book, they were
scary flesh and blood animals that could tear someone to pieces, here,
they’re just barking pixels. Other things like the outfits Katniss and
Peeta wore on the night of their big public introduction were written in
the book as spectacular, flaming creations that started the sponsorship
ball rolling and created jealousy amongst the other Tributes; onscreen,
not so much. In the crunch for time we also lost a lot of my favourite
character from the book, a Tribute called Rue. She was the youngest
player in the Games; a tiny girl possessed of unexpected athletic
ability and a wonderful background story, both of which we are deprived
of in the film. Amandla Stenberg is so adorable and charming in the
role that you feel for her immediately despite the lack of storyline,
but her cuteness only makes one sorry there wasn’t more.
Jennifer Lawrence is our lead as Katniss Everdeen, who, with rare
exceptions, never seems laboured with an surfeit of facial expressions,
but then again, the Katniss of the novel wasn’t exactly a torrent of
emotion. Lawrence looks healthier and fresher-faced than a girl from an
impoverished coal-mining district might, but I guess we can put that
down to her excellent hunting skills. It is also more realistic when
she has to perform feats of derring-do, like running across a flaming
forest at top speed, shooting birds out of the air with her bow and
arrows and climbing trees like a squirrel. Lawrence puts over the
action very convincingly and gives it her all, which is what makes those
sequences fun to watch in spite of some of the production’s drawbacks.
Her presence doesn’t exactly set the screen on fire, but Lawrence makes
Katniss believable and imminently more likeable than her literary
avatar, who is personality-deprived and annoying (Yet has the love of
the two most eligible young men in District 12. Is her surname Everdeen
or Swan?). We are happily spared the silly, Twilight-ish romantic
turmoil of Katniss’ oscillating emotions for Gale, with whom she’s spent
so many years alone in the woods and has never made a move, and Peeta,
who announces his feelings for Katniss in front of the whole
television-watching planet. This Katniss is more practical than to
wangst about her love life when she’s working on trying not to die, and
for that I am very thankful. The film and Lawrence’s interpretation
makes her a smarter, more sensible heroine, which is certainly deserving
of praise. Peeta is played by Josh Hutcherson, who also doesn’t quite
set the screen alight, but is adorably boy-next-door enough to sell the
puppy-dog crush angle. The veterans like Harrelson, Banks and Stanley
Tucci in a runny-looking blue wig as the film’s host/exposition
database, American Beauty’s long-lost Wes Bentley in a ridiculous beard
as the beleaguered Games director and Donald Sutherland as the
President, who keeps a beady eye on the political ramifications of the
Games, do all the heavy lifting.
There
are some really touching scenes that conjured loud sobs from the
audience throughout the film; starting right off with Primrose being
dragged away screaming from Katniss after big sis volunteers to take
Prim’s place as a Tribute. Other moments of loss and horror are
rendered well in the midst of the Games’ chaos, including the initial
bloodbath where Tributes off each other in a frenzy as they race for
supplies. The noticeable lack of background music brings a lot of
gravity to these moments and makes them more effective and harrowing.
The Hunger Games maintains enough of the novel’s emotion and romance to
satisfy faithful fans while supplying plenty of action to keep the whole
audience entertained. Neither a perfect, nor even a great film, I’ll take The
Hunger Games over the Twilight series any day, but it’s still no Battle Royale.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
March
22nd, 2012
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