Movie Review: The Hunger Games (2012)

Well, this one certainly has the stink of Twilight on it. While that execrable series deserves to be soundly made fun of at every turn, The Hunger Games should at least get a fair shake on its own merits, instead of the consistant and unavoidable comparisons with those other tween bestsellers. Now, I have not read The Hunger Games, and I don't plan on doing so. I can say, without resorting to lengthy, rote recitations of the differences between the source and the adaptation (differences which always end up reinstating a tired heirarchy of the arts, venerating literature and bastardizing film), that this film is about as ordinary as can be, and just barely competent enough to be watchable. Enough has been said of the alleged allusions or homages or thefts from Running Man, Gladiator, Starship Troopers, Truman Show. That kind of sophomoric listing has little critical value, and even worse, it doesn't matter to audiences. Hunger Games is set in an ill-defined, unnecessarily vague and dystopic future, where rustic "districts" must each select one child from both genders to do combat for the "State" on national TV until only one remains alive. Our focus is on Katniss Everdeen, a young woman who volunteers to represent her district in place of her younger sister. She is then teamed up with her male "partner," perpetual mouth-breather Peeta Mellark, and off they go to train for the sadistic games.

Moot points about originality aside, what matters is the way this story, however recycled, is told. Unfortunately, Hunger Games makes several key formal errors. One element that has drawn significant criticism is the use of the reviled "shaky cam," and rightly so. I can understand the desire for a kind of documentary realism, but the camera movement is so messy and burlesqued that I often had no idea what was going on until the characters came to a stop, and even then, by the time I had regained my bearings, off we were again on another blotted green trip through the simulated woods. Even when the camera was forced to settle down for a minute while Katniss and Peeta gabbed, their dialogue was so insipid, and their delivery so poor, that I secretly wished for the familiar Roy G. Biv blur to resume. During these confabs, though, K and P decide to put on a front of love. They do this in order to earn the support of a million-plus saps watching around the world, specifically the powerful "sponsors," who, if properly touched or impressed by their "affection," can provided emergency medical supplies to the participants. Naturally, this kind of unintentional self-critique is something Hollywood simply cannot stand. And, naturally, simplistically, their love soon ceases to be an act, so what could have been a wonderful challenge to the kind of enforced, monogamist pair-bonding characteristic of Hollywood, becomes yet another triumph of simplistic, unfettered, "normal" heterosexual love. Hunger Games is just another movie, albeit one without conviction, without awareness, without politics.