The Hunger Games started off as a series of super successful young adult novels written by Suzanne Collins (who also has a screenwriting credit here). Its main character is a beautiful teenage girl named Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). She’s got two male friends named Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson). And she’s got some strengths and abilities that set her apart from the rest of the young women her age. These superficial similarities to Twilight have led to a lot of comparisons between the two series; but don’t fall into the trap of pitting them against each other. The characters here aren’t self absorbed and melodramatic like the characters in Twilight. They’re not naval-gazing, weak, and obsessed with their own sex lives. As a matter of fact, they’re pretty much the opposite of that. The Hunger Games is packed to the brim with strong, selfless, independent characters who could make good role models for any coming of age young tween. So get all of that weepy protagonist and love triangle nonsense out of your head right now.
Because the crux of these young characters’ stories involves a battle to the death that pits 24 school children against each other in a deadly arena, lots of comparisons have been made between this property and the manga-turned-movie Battle Royale as well. But this story is more about its characters, it doesn’t have the exploitive thirst for violence and gleeful approach to mayhem of its Japanese counterpart. And seeing as these games are taking place in a future world called Panem, where a corrupt government maintains control over twelve isolated and impoverished districts, a lot of comparisons have been made to literary works like ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984.’ But The Hunger Games doesn’t much engage in satire and allegory like those more high-minded works do. The evil regime here is more an all-powerful villain meant to make for good escapist storytelling than it is a stand-in for the corruption happening in the real world. No, despite the fact that it’s made of a patchwork of elements from various, familiar genre works, The Hunger Games isn’t nearly as derivative as people make it out to be. It’s actually a work with distinct, memorable characters, and some pretty impressive world building. And in our current climate of remakes, reboots, and needless sequels, thank God for that.
Unfortunately, as an adaptation, The Hunger Games isn’t completely successful. The first thing you notice about this movie is that the camera work is absolutely dreadful. Every scene, no matter the tone or content, is shot with frantic, shaky, handheld camera work, from more angles than it needs to be, with more frequent cuts than a movie that wants its audience to be able to follow its action should have. Likely a large part of this approach is meant to mask the fact that director Gary Ross and his crew didn’t quite have the resources or budget necessary to bring an epic-in-scope story like this to life in a satisfactory way, and to hide the fact that there is far too much grisly violence inherent in this story for the film to easily get its financially necessary PG-13 rating. But, despite the reasons, that still means you’re watching a film that presents its material deliberately poorly, and the results are both dizzying and frustrating.
As far as that PG-13 rating goes; that was one of the big challenges in adapting this work in the first place. Twenty-some children are murdered over the course of this story, and yet there was no chance anyone involved was ever going to allow the film to get an R-rating. Consequently, the deaths fly by so fast that you hardly even notice them. There is one specific death that is important to the story, and it gets presented in a frank manner, but, other than that, constant murder happens just off screen, or with a quick enough cut away that you never really see any of the damage happening to the kids. The results are rather numbing. It’s kind of sick how we would give an R-rating to a movie that lingers over the child death and really hammers home what a horrible thing it is, but we can give a PG-13 to one that glosses over everything and makes the deaths seem like something to cheer for, simply because less is shown on the screen. The ratings system is clearly broken, and this movie is made poorer because of its need to adhere to it.
The other big challenge Ross and his people had in adapting this story is that it’s just too dense in plot and character for everything to be contained in one movie; even one that lasts two hours and twenty minutes. Some things needed to be cut out, other things needed to get greater focus, but instead this screenplay does whatever it can to cram everything in so that it doesn’t have to restructure the story. Consequently, everything gets short shrift. Moments don’t hit as hard as they would if they got proper focus, characters aren’t developed as much as we want them to be, their relationships don’t get well enough established. The whole film flies by like a rapid fire series of bullet points and few things get the proper chance to sink in and have real impact. It would have taken some impressive ingenuity to adapt a story this big into a single, wholly satisfying movie, and unfortunately Suzanne Collins and Gary Ross don’t have it in them. They do fine, they make a watchable movie, but nothing special.
Let’s not dwell so much in negativity though, because even if it’s not perfectly told here, this is still a rich, interesting story, and for most audiences it will make for a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies. Plus, the film does have one show-stopping trick up its sleeve: the performances. Every aspect of the mediocre screenwriting and direction gets elevated by the actors bringing this world to life, and if there’s one task the people in charge of this production performed perfectly, it was the casting process.
It would be impossible to talk about this movie without addressing Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen. Katniss is a character who is strong and mature beyond her years, and she needed a very special actress to bring her to life. She takes care of her sister, hunts for food to keep her family alive, and stands brave in the face of a terrifying reality; not just any young actress would do. Luckily for the filmmakers, Jennifer Lawrence already played a character exactly like this in Winter’s Bone, and did such a smashing job that she earned herself an Oscar Nomination. I saw Winter’s Bone before I read ‘The Hunger Games,’ so the entire time I read through the books I was already picturing Lawrence in the role. When she finally got cast, the choice couldn’t have seemed more obvious to me. Lawrence is believable as a teenager, a vulnerable young woman, but there’s still something that’s just so capable and mature that radiates out of her. She’s believable no matter what she’s doing, and she was basically born to play this role.
The other actor that gets the most to do is Josh Hutcherson, who’s playing Peeta, the son of a baker who enters into The Hunger Games alongside Katniss as the other tribute from District 12. Hutcherson already impressed me in The Kids Are All Right, and he’s really good here as well. He’s charming when he needs to be, pathetic when he needs to be, and brings a character that could have been a bit of a dullard to life with surprising spark. The one complaint I had about his performance is that he seemed to have zero romantic chemistry with Lawrence; but seeing as Peeta is a character who always likes the girl a bit more than she likes him, I don’t even know if that should be a complaint or not. It was appropriate here, but it gave me some worries about how they’ll fare as a screen duo as their relationship develops over the series.
It’s always nice to see Woody Harrelson show up in things, and his character Haymitch, the drunken Hunger Games winner who serves as Katniss and Peeta’s mentor, was probably my favorite from the books. So it was hard for me to see that his was the character most neutered in translation from page to screen. Harrelson is fun working with what he’s given, but what he’s given isn’t much. Haymitch’s transition from sloppy drunk to engaged mentor happens at an alarmingly speed, and the depths of the addictions and mental problems he’s struggling with are tragically ignored. For those not familiar with the books, something like this won’t play as a disappointment; but for the rest of us, seeing the character of Haymitch reduced to little more than a plot point is a hard hit to take.
There are a lot of other notable performances in this film other than those main three. To name everyone who does good work would be exhausting and repetitive: Stanley Tucci is great fun as a creepy media personality, Donald Sutherland is appropriately grim and threatening as the president, Lenny Kravitz is charming and warm as the kids’ stylist, etc... I do want to make special mention of Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket, the woman who presides over the lethal lottery that chooses the games’ participants, however. She’s nearly unrecognizable under all of the makeup and wigs inherent to the character, but she still manages to shine. There’s not much to laugh at in this story, but Banks had me chuckling several times. Trinket is a self-centered, air-headed, callous member of the upper crust, and her level of phoniness, and the way she’s able to maintain a grin while stabbing you in the gut, it’s so nauseating that it becomes darkly amusing.
The Hunger Games is a movie full of plusses and minuses, an equal enough amount of each that I’ve given it an Even Steven rating of three stars. For every moment like Katniss and Peeta’s first introduction to the public, which played like a big deal in the book but came off as cheesy and lame in the movie, there’s a moment like the choosing of the contestants, which is built to so well it will make you furious that you’re being introduced to a world where little girls are made to go through things like this. For every moment like the awkward, unnecessary cut to Gale’s face after Katniss and Peeta kiss, which was a pandering and lame way to assure the most dense members of the audience that there’s something of a love triangle coming, we get a moment like the scene where Katniss is below the Hunger Games arena, waiting to be sent up to the impending danger above. It’s a scene that lingers long enough to let us feel the full weight, tension, and horror of the situation. It’s a moment that hits with violent impact, that truly gets under your skin. When you’re watching that scene you want to do anything you can to get Katniss out of the situation, but you know that it’s hopeless. At its best, that’s what The Hunger Games is: a completely enthralling, enveloping experience, and a perfect example of movie escapism. Unfortunately, it’s not at its best often enough to be a completely successful film.
