‘THE HUNGER GAMES’ REVIEW: Decently Enjoyable Teen Slaughter

I’ll be honest, I ain’t big on reviews. Firstly because I find them boring as shit to write, and secondly I hate committing to how I feel about something so immediately after I experience it. Lots of revision going on in my dome-piece after I ingest a work. That said, I want to ignite some conversation about The Hunger Games here at OL.

I didn’t hate The Hunger Games, and at times I felt it was excellent. Unfortunately, the beginning set the bar so high for me that there was nowhere for the Righteous Meter to go but down. The flick starts off as a haunting dystopia and slowly slumbers down into a recounting of the familiar beats of the book. This is the potential pitfall of any adaptation, where you constantly drag the line between overdrawn and underdeveloped.

As aforementioned, my favorite part of the flick was our look into District 12 as the movie kicks off. The manner in which it is shot captures a quiet despair ripping through the oppressed guts of everyone inhabiting the area. Even as I read the novel the level of destitution the people suffered never hit home. District 12 is the sort of town these people would want to escape, but not at the cost of wholesale slaughter that The Hunger Games provide. Director Gary Ross captures this ambiance with close-ups and simplicity. There ain’t no swirling soundtrack to rouse emotions, nor gallant shots sweeping the town. All of this swag creatures a claustrophobic interiority that infiltrates the scenes, causing the entire enterprise to feel dismal as fuck.

It’s in these moments where I was impressed at how raw the movie felt. I’ve commented to more than one person that I was taken aback by how bleak the movie was, how it captured the premise’s darkness without flinching. They recite the plot back to me, and that’s fair enough. However Ross and Lionsgate could have taken any chance to honey-glaze the nonsense, but they refrained. It pays dividends.

As the movie segues out of the District, the movie undergoes a tonal shift. It’s a necessary transition, as the simplicity and stripped-down nature of the town has to be contrasted with the bloated Noise of the Capitol. The juxtaposition wouldn’t work if Ross had kept it as quiet, and I’m sure the alienation of going from one tone to the other is intended. We’re ripped out of the barren guts of Katniss’ town and shoved into the heart of Western Culture’s Bloat. The Capitol is Collins’ hyperbolic representation of the bread and circuses she spent the trilogy condemning, and provides a ground for laughing at how douchey they are while squirming a bit at ourselves.

As a brief aside: if you were double-fisting Double XL popcorn twice-glazed in popcorn in a Polo shirt during the flick while loving the flick, I hate to inform you but you may have missed the message. Of course a novel about distraction and excess being made into a movie that perpetuates distraction and excess is not without its own irony.

At the Capitol we get the tributes’ training. The quintessential scene where Katniss fires an arrow near American Beauty’s head. Peeta’s overwrought speech about wanting to maintain an identity within a system that provides no room for agency. Then it’s off to the Games!

The Games!

My problem with the film as a whole is that for a movie titled The Hunger Games and marketed around its Battle Royale-esque throwdown to the death, this was the weakest portion of the movie for me. Shifting from the patience atmosphere building in District 12 to the enjoyably obvious social commentary and Jennifer Lawrence in tight tracksuit of the Capitol to the quick-paced nature of the Games never felt right to me.

Like some of the latter Potter movies, the final portion of the film became a Beat by Beat recitation of the plot, hitting the key moments while interspersing new ones as they went. We get the tearjerker scene that is telegraphed all the way from space, the cringe-inducing young adult love dialogue, but where’s the survivalism? I know that having days pass with methodical shots of Katniss foraging and trying to survive the wilderness would have plunged the enterprise into Lord of the Rings levels of banality, but I would have enjoyed some semblance of it.

The Games themselves feel like a case of “And then!” And then this happens! And then this! And this!

If they were feeling pressed for time, it didn’t stop them from interspersing some new content that takes place in the Capitol during the games. Curiously we have Haymitch pleading with the Gamesmaker to spare Katniss’ live, which strikes me as a bullshit move. Reading through the novel it always felt as though Katniss was earning her existence. Defying the odds. They rob her of her autonomy by having Haymitch make moves and the Gamesmaker plead with President Snow to allow Katniss and Peeta to be turned into Star Crossed Lovers. It downplays the fact that Katniss herself forced that sentiment onto the drooling-mouthed public who were watching the Games.

I’m belly aching a lot, but I could be persuaded to say the movie is good. Such persuasion would just be a lot of references to Jennifer Lawrence and Dystopias and Social Commentary. It’d work. I’d recommend it just for the first forty minutes alone, even if the flick stumbled into mediocrity during what was supposed to be the heartstone of the story. The keystone.

There, I got the ball rolling.

What’d you all think?