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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 20 March 2012
This article is a review of THE HUNGER GAMES. |
“Okay, listen to me, you're stronger than they are. You are. They just want a good show, that's all they want. You know how to hunt. Show them how good you are,” Gale Hawthorne to Katniss Everdeen.
This should have been knocked out of the park. The novels are ridiculously exciting, and are a gripping parable on despotism and tyranny. However, a weak adaptation has resulted. Too many big potential franchises over the last decade, stemming from fascinating sci-fi/fantasy, have been given to a bland director, rather than someone who has a proven track record of daring artistic vision. Look at Harry Potter (director Chris Columbus – MRS. DOUBTFIRE) and HIS DARK MATERIALS (director Chris Weitz – ABOUT A BOY). Gary Ross, the director of SEABISCUIT, was somehow chosen to be in charge of the beloved first in THE HUNGER GAMES trilogy. What about his output suggested he could bring life to a dystopian look at the future of America (now called Panem)? The Capitol rules the 12 outlying districts with a cruel, merciless autocracy. It keeps the majority of the population in virtual starvation, as they slave away providing the ruling classes with an endless supply of luxury. Compounding the misery, the annual Hunger Games has been occurring for almost three-quarters of a century, where as punishment for the 13 districts uprising, each has to handover one male and one female “tribute” between the ages of 12 and 18 to fight in an arena to the death. There is to be only one survivor/winner. The 13th district was annihilated as a warning too (weirdly left out of the film). Not only have we political and social commentary, there is a gripping first person narrative from a headstrong young woman, Katniss Everdeen. She has to survive, protect her loved ones, and is caught up in a credible love-triangle. And the other characters do not suffer in the telling of her story. All delivered with rare traces of sentimentality; in fact the conclusion of the third book is gut-wrenching. Heady stuff then.
This should have been knocked out of the park. The novels are ridiculously exciting, and are a gripping parable on despotism and tyranny. However, a weak adaptation has resulted. Too many big potential franchises over the last decade, stemming from fascinating sci-fi/fantasy, have been given to a bland director, rather than someone who has a proven track record of daring artistic vision. Look at Harry Potter (director Chris Columbus – MRS. DOUBTFIRE) and HIS DARK MATERIALS (director Chris Weitz – ABOUT A BOY). Gary Ross, the director of SEABISCUIT, was somehow chosen to be in charge of the beloved first in THE HUNGER GAMES trilogy. What about his output suggested he could bring life to a dystopian look at the future of America (now called Panem)? The Capitol rules the 12 outlying districts with a cruel, merciless autocracy. It keeps the majority of the population in virtual starvation, as they slave away providing the ruling classes with an endless supply of luxury. Compounding the misery, the annual Hunger Games has been occurring for almost three-quarters of a century, where as punishment for the 13 districts uprising, each has to handover one male and one female “tribute” between the ages of 12 and 18 to fight in an arena to the death. There is to be only one survivor/winner. The 13th district was annihilated as a warning too (weirdly left out of the film). Not only have we political and social commentary, there is a gripping first person narrative from a headstrong young woman, Katniss Everdeen. She has to survive, protect her loved ones, and is caught up in a credible love-triangle. And the other characters do not suffer in the telling of her story. All delivered with rare traces of sentimentality; in fact the conclusion of the third book is gut-wrenching. Heady stuff then.
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It is of course not easy to adapt adored source material, especially one that is packed with backstory and incident. It can be done though (e.g. THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the final Harry Potter). It is not done here unfortunately. Even though there is an hour devoted to setting up characters, motivations and context before the Games begin, it is wasted. Neither is that hour efficiently used to pack as much world-building as possible, nor is it used to make you care about those involved. Jennifer Lawrence is a very talented actress (see THE BURNING PLAIN and WINTER’S BONE), however, she is given very little to work with. The internal monologue of the novel is not transferred to satisfying exchanges on the silver screen. She appears to have just variations of one expression. The conflicts that she agonises over, and prevent her being a bland lead, are ironed out. And then there is the fact there are two guys who are meant to be in love her. We are meant to care about this amorousness, which has contradictorily been given front-and-centre instead of the thrills of survival and the importance of social commentary, but is hugely unsatisfying. Both Josh Hutcherson’s Peeta Mellark and Liam Hemsworth's Gale Hawthorne are so wetly played. We are in awful TWILIGHT territory. What is such a crying shame is that this keeps happening with adaptations, where the big ideas in the plot are subsumed for the romantic elements built up out of proportion, as if the audience won’t be drawn to the cinema otherwise – think HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE and the upcoming SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN.
Okay, so the characterisation is flat and the political commentary has been nixed, but at least the action is top-notch right? Wrong. The camera is shaken to an inch of its life. How are we meant to have our pulse quickened if we can’t see what’s happening?
THE HUNGER GAMES deserved to be awesome. It’s possible to create the vacuous thrills of a game show where contestants die (Arnie’s THE RUNNING MAN), or the truly gripping where school children are forced to kill one another (BATTLE ROYALE), or show an imaginative future world of reduced choices (LOGAN’S RUN); which makes the fact that it’s been done before all the more galling. This should have the grandeur and romance and spectacle of something akin to Michael Mann’s THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Instead we got inert mediocrity.
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