The Hunger Games is a teen action movie set in a dystopian future that acts as a commentary of today’s society, specifically the Occupy Wall Street movement with the poor (99%) against the rich (1%) alongside today’s pop culture sensation with reality television where people compete against others for fame & riches. The nation Panem has twelve districts, with the first two being the utter rich and the rest becoming more middle class to ultimately the very poor where people are forced to hunt squirrels and berries for mere survival. The Hunger Games itself is a gladiator survival match where two people (male & woman) are randomly picked from each district into the battle zone and only one may leave it alive.
Our protagonist Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) hails from the utter poor district 12 as the symbolic figure of the 99% alongside with Robin Hood symbolism her weapon of choice the bow & arrow. She is a survivor, beautiful, wise and utterly pure, nothing is wrong with her and the poor people as they are the heroes, they are the ones the audience has to root and cheer for, only the poor receive any positive light whatsoever in this film.
What about the rich then? The fashion for the rich is not any commentary on today’s fashion, but it seems to be very Lady Gaga inspired with people going over the top colors and crazy make up, it felt like the 1960s when color televisions became mainstreamed and people started wearing bright colors to show their clothing off instead of the bland grey and white. However the main point about the rich (or well, the evil 1% Wall Street people) is that they have no redeeming qualities. The rich are selfish, amoral, cruel and absolutely corrupt, some are even flat out insane, but the movie represents not a single good willed person, but simply that the rich are evil and the poor are good. Am I supposed to take this seriously? How one sighted and utterly pessimistic view is this?
As for the movie itself, it is two and half hour long and well for me, with all this positive reviews it has received alongside become a huge box office hit in the world, I really was expecting more and found myself very disappointed because of the latter half of the movie. The movie is very character driven and while the movie does not carry Katniss’ thoughts thru inner monologue, the fantastic performance of Lawrence shows great lengths of talent as her mere face tells us everything we need, with the orchestral soundtrack by the talented James Newton Howard, you have a great tools of displaying the emotional core of the money, but sadly it does become unintentionally laughable how blandly forced the “poor are noble, good and pure with rich being corrupt, evil and amoral”.
Now the actual Hunger Games doesn’t begin until the latter half and the director Gary Ross is clearly new to the action films genre and sadly does the worst possible decision with the movie, very closed up shaky camera scenes instead of clear wide and visually stunning action. It’s hard to be scared or cheer for the leading protagonist when it’s impossible to tell who actually is winning. I also found it incredibly bland how the game could be determined if you had “sponsors” or got killed by additional foes send by the game master, I mean image if Idol had elements like fan favorite singer getting special treatments or while during a song performance you also had to multi-task other elements? I just found that incredibly lame.
Overall, like I said I was disappointed. Its start off incredibly well with a very character driven emotional story that simply turns into a rich vs. poor commentary and to make it worse, there is no real big payoff to this movie, just a big hook for the sequel. You can’t end a movie with no real closure outside of hyping out the inevitable sequel. Also to explain a little, the reason these rich vs. poor commentaries are really stupid, is that they don’t offer any real alternate options outside of this very romanced ideal of a modern day Robin Hood. “In Time” movie had the very same problem with the protagonists just stealing from the rich to the poor in a very optimistic (and somehow successful light) and even Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” doesn’t offer any strong arguments how to fix today’s economic problems. You just get these “yeah a civil war against the rich and the poor, the poor will win and thus create utopia” is just so far reached.
The TAS trailer attached to the movie didn't help things either (awesome trailer btw, esp the clips with Spidey in costume).
