Film Review: “The Hunger Games”

David Begelman

The film adaptation of the first book of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy, “The Hunger Games” is set in a post-apocalyptic North America of the haves and have-nots. It’s the same North America that has dominated the market on bad, overblown and over-budgeted films, although the definition of “good” is admittedly up for grabs in many quarters.

For example, Jeff Bock of the Los Angeles Exhibitor Relations Company feels that along with “The Hunger Games,” the quality of films is getting “exponentially better this year,” a claim he eerily attempts to justify by referring to the superlative marketing strategies of the studios in appealing to “very specific demographics.”

Evidently, Mr. Bock’s standard of excellence boils down—as you probably surmised—to what brings in the bucks. A movie that cashes in to the tune of nearly a quarter of a billion since March 23 just has to be of superior artistic mettle! Maybe the conclusion is inescapable in Hollywood, especially since the profits were gargantuan: the film cost only 80 million to make.

Some of us harbor a quite different measure of excellence, and not because we are nervous Nellies over film violence. After all, we can revere films like “Paths of Glory,” “The French Connection,” (and if post-apocalyptical themes are your pleasure, “Blade Runner”) that abound in violence. Except unlike “The Hunger Games” they are not suffused with violence that is plainly gratuitous or laced remorselessly with inane artifice.

“The Hunger Games” is formulaic precisely because we have seen it all before in movies, from the Japanese “Battle Royale” in which youngsters are sent to a place where they fight each other to the death, to “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” where a ruthless power elite stages battles to the death of contestants introduced to their contests by a ghoulish M.C. who announces, “It’s Killing Time!” And we are reminded of Golding’s  “Lord of the Flies,” in which kids form an inbred and homicidal civilization.

Director Gary Ross’s flick is about the adventures of Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence, in transparently a downturn from her arresting characterization as an Ozark girl in “Winter’s Bone”). Katniss hails from an impoverished district her tormentors envision as the underbelly of their brave new world. She is a huntress, adept at stalking game with bow and arrow, providing for her starving family, and manifesting an individualism that one overlord, President Snow (Donald Sutherland), fears in youngsters for whom hope springs eternal.

Katniss volunteers to substitute for her younger sister, Primrose (Willow Shields) in a game in which teenagers are forced to fight to the death while their exploits are broadcast on television. Katniss prevails against all odds, and escapes to the woods (albeit a bit more hastily than heroines in “As You Like It” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream”), hides in trees, gets assailed by peers with nothing but winning and murder on their minds and by electronically devised hounds that are combos of enormous pit-bulls and Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld.

All of which proves that when you produce a film that conflates reality shows, video-games, survival themes, and cops and robbers scenarios with a youth culture as  put-upons, you get to score mightily—especially if you’re on the youngish side. And we can do without cinematographer Tom Stern’s obvious filching from “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield” the distracting device of filming with hand-held camera, as if the jerky outcome were somehow a fast track to cinematic realism.

 “Do you know where your kids are?” Evidently, many parents do—they’re at the movies, even when the film is tedious and, in this case, hazardous to your aesthetic health.