Fans could not have dreamt of a more faithful, powerful, and exciting adaptation of The Hunger Games as this movie gives.
Jennifer Lawrence plays a teenager who has long since been forced to become an adult. She has a younger sibling whom she hunts and risks her life every day to feed, and an unreliable and sometimes invalid mother who cannot be counted on. She has received little help and has long since accepted this fact. It is kind of insane how much the characters are the same. Yes, it is the exact same character as in Winter’s Bone. But that is who Katniss Everdeen is in the book, and that is a person Lawrence is best at playing. We see her coldness, we see her paranoia, and we even see enough of humanity in the character that we can relate to her.
Unlike Winter’s Bone, The Hunger Games takes place in a dystopian future where the evil Capitol government forces twenty-four teenagers to fight to the death in a miles wide arena in order to squash any ideas at a rebellion. The teens are selected randomly, with two from each district. Since Katniss’s is little more than a coal mining village she has the worst odds. It isn’t Katniss who is selected--it’s her sister, Prim--but obviously Katniss volunteers to take her place. She is paired up with Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutchinson of Journey to the Center of the Earth and its sequel), a wealthier citizen who’s life, while difficult, has not been nearly as scary as Katniss’s. This of course makes him much easier to relate to, but the movie resists the urge to make him a one-dimensional nice-guy. This movie must set up the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale Hawthorne (a rebellious villager who is Katniss’s only friend, played by The Last Song’s Liam Hemsworth), and we can’t have a stake in the romance if we don’t genuinely care about the characters.
Lawrence and Hutchinson have a great dynamic, and their relationship feels so very real. Peeta seems naive, but never stupid; Katniss is cold, yet we never hate her for it.
Gary Ross (Seabiscuit), who got the role of writer/director after creating an elaborate storyboard and some test footage and presenting it to Lionsgate, understood the basic rule of adapting a book to a movie: You must love the source material. Ross meticulously recreates every scene, and when he must make changes he clearly does so with the first and foremost thought being to be faithful to the book.
In addition to faithfully adapting the book, Ross brings such skillful directing and story-telling skills he has set himself up as a must for any action adventure Hollywood wants to have start a franchise. While there is nothing wrong with voice-over narration, it is used in an awful lot of movies, so Ross instead shows some scenes of a commentator on the games (Stanley Tucci, excellent as usual) and the conversations between the Capitol president and the guy who designed the arena (Donald Sutherland and Wes Bentley). This only works since Lawrence is such a good actress, and it is not overdone to the effect of distancing ourselves from the unknown terrors of the combat zone (a vast forest full of fearsome beasts, giant fireballs, and other terrible dangers).
Best of all, though, Ross manages to make the movie an exciting action film without having the audience delight in deaths of the other teens. This is supposed to be horrifying, and yet it is going to be difficult to make an action movie while avoiding the action. Ross uses close-ups and circles the camera around and around the chaos so as to make us feel the intensity of Katniss’s situation and worry more about her surviving than her enemies dying. For the deaths, the cast members are often so young and the kills are extremely bloody (except for viewers in England, where the film was edited), but the close-ups keep it from getting an R-rating. The editing team behind this film deserves an Oscar nomination.
There still has to be some flaws in even the best of films. Katniss’s stylist, Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), one of the book’s best characters, seems bland and boring. The alcoholic mentor of Katniss and Peeta,Haymitch Abernathy, is a fascinating person, but Woody Harrelsonsometimes hams it up a tad too much. The final monsters are a little generic and lack the realistic touches of the similar beasts in movies like The Twilight Saga and The Chronicles of Narnia. And the books famous fire-costumes look stupid and underwhelming--and out of place in the otherwise Oscar-worthy costumes. The biggest fault, though, is that there is no real conclusion to movie--it is the first in a three or four picture series and nothing is resolved.
The movie does get one point across--the frightening effects of a desensitized society’s delight in violence and barbarian values in the media in general. Reality TV is a specific target of the movie. It is still a big leap to make--after all, snuff films are still illegal--but I think it is nice to see a movie suggest that perhaps there is something unhealthy to the inherent unkindness of certain shows despite an unmistakable allure of the possibility of winning fame and fortune.
Let’s hope Lionsgate brings back Ross and his team and they manage to keep up the quality to finish the entire series.
