The Hunger Games - review

Stepping in where Harry Potter left off, the first in a series of adaptations of Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster trilogy has everything its young target audience could want — coy romance, futuristic adventure and reality TV.
David Sexton16 July 2013

So unfair! Kevin the Teenager is far from alone in feeling that. It’s a normal part of adolescence to find what grown-ups expect of you is unreasonable, if not actually incomprehensible. The Hunger Games ups the ante on this common experience. This is a movie that shows teenagers being really unfairly treated. Could that have anything to do with why real ones think it’s so great?

Post-apocalyptic America is ruled by a decadent hub called the Capitol, where the rich prance around in ridiculous clothes and lurid make-up. To punish a past uprising,each of the 12 impoverished outlying districts is required to send a teenage girl and boy each year as “Tributes” to compete in a savage fight to the death, broadcast as the ultimate reality TV show. So unfair!

When, in the starving mining region of District 12, formerly Appalachia, 12-year-old Prim Everdeen is selected, her 16-year-old sister Katniss at once bravely volunteers to go in her place. She has a chance at least, being a skilful hunter, a dab hand with a bow and arrow, and the all-round coper in her family. Her co-tribute turns out to be the local baker’s son, Peeta, who, though she doesn’t know it yet, has a total crush on her.

Off they go to the distant Capitol, to be primped and briefly feted, before being sent out into the arena, to slaughter or be slaughtered, using the random selection of weapons supplied, all on live TV. Only one of the 24 teenagers will survive.

But you knew this. Certainly most of the potential audience for this film will know the story in advance, for since it was published in 2008, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has sold 10 million copies worldwide and reached near saturation point among teenage readers, especially girls, taking up the slack left by the completion of the Harry Potter and Twilight sequences.

Lionsgate, the company that has made this film, is now hoping to duplicate the movie success of those series and it’ll succeed, for sure. Collins’s young-adult novel is a skilfully calibrated, highly readable concoction. There seems an almost limitless appetite at the moment for stories about plucky teenagers fighting for survival, after being abandoned by adults, in dystopian futures. Although Collins has thrown in some future technology, she’s judiciously eschewed magic and the supernatural, while carefully reproducing that captivating dilemma for a girl that’s at the heart of Twilight — having two doting hunks on hand, so hard to choose between.

What Collins significantly adds to these familiar components is the way the whole thing is a reality TV show, just like The X Factor and Big Brother, only more extreme. The film in fact only reaches the arena when it is more than halfway through, feeling slow and over-emphatic up until this point, but perhaps to a generation raised on the rituals of talent shows it feels more pointful.

Collins herself has been heavily involved in the film and the result has something of the ponderous earnestness such authorial participation often yields. Yet it is well cast and pretty well acted, certainly when compared to Harry Potter’s juvenile leads.

Jennifer Lawrence, superb as the tenacious country girl Ree in Winter’s Bone, is excellent again as Katniss. She’s a light and plausible runner, which is what she does half the time, with a strong face, narrow-eyed, self-contained and often quite impassive. Unlike the heroine of Twilight, Katniss is independent, capable and fierce when she needs to be, proving tougher than the boys, a welcome change. However, although Lawrence is still very young by most standards (21), she seems already quite mature to be playing a 16-year-old in a scenario in which every year of age counts quite physically.

As Peeta, 19-year-old Josh Hutcherson (the boy in The Kids Are All Right) isn’t her match in charisma but has a nice line in wounded devotion. The other Tributes are less differentiated, allowing the cynic to guess without trouble who’ll still be there at the end.

Woody Harrelson, complete with blonde wig, is unpredictable and devilish in an almost Jack Nicholson style as the drunken trainer, Haymitch; Donald Sutherland romps away as old but still mightily evil President Snow, while Stanley Tucci camps it up tremendously, in a big blue hairpiece and scary teeth, as a wildly over the top TV presenter.

It’s a 12A, though. The violence, therefore, remains unclear, kept that way by a juddery, blurry handheld filming style borrowed from Twilight, where the violent jerking of the camera substitutes for the action.

There is no sexuality even hinted at from beginning to end, perhaps because the producers were fearful of it, given the age of the characters.

So The Hunger Games absolutely delivers for its target audience: younger teenagers. To them, it can be highly recommended.

And it’s barely relevant then that, as an adult, I didn’t find the characters involving or the film convincing.

Collins has said her ideas came from classical antiquity (sacrifices to the Minotaur, the Roman games) and from channel surfing between reality TV and war reporting. She maintains that even now she has never read or seen Battle Royale, the 1999 novel and 2000 film, the 60th and last movie to have been made by the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku. She should put that right.

Battle Royale is a nasty masterpiece, far superior to The Hunger Games, which is amazingly similar to it, the Hollywood gloss on the same story, whatever Collins says.

In a troubled future Japan, each year an entire 9th grade high school class of 42 is picked by lottery to be taken to an island, given an assortment of weapons, and told that in three days there can only be one survivor, the proceedings being broadcast on TV.

In Battle Royale, the actors are themselves teenagers and completely authentic. Moreover, the whole drama is enormously heightened by the fact that they are long-term classmates with all that implies of trust, resentment and infatuation. In just hours, instead of over a lifetime, these relationships play out fatally. It’s a shocker — and it only finally achieved a theatrical release in the US last year (here it’s available as a DVD). For what it’s worth, Quentin Tarantino says it’s his favourite film of the past 20 years. And Battle Royale is not for young adults, it’s about them — a much more serious matter.

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