For a carefully engineered pop-culture phenomenon and money-minting machine, the movie version of The Hunger Games ain’t half bad.
As you likely know, the film takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where the United States has become the totalitarian nation of Panem (a country that seems to be built from equal parts Walker Evans photography and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis).
Every year, the rulers of Panem hold the Hunger Games, a live televised gladiatorial spectacle for which 24 teenagers are chosen by lottery to participate. These children are required to fight and kill each other until a single boy or girl remains alive.
The movie follows 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen who volunteers for the games to save her younger sister, and who joins the boy chosen from her “district” to participate in the games – a boy we’ll discover soon enough has a crush on her.
What The Hunger Games Gets Right: Totalitarian Brutality, Katniss, and Haymitch
Gary Ross’ film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ novel gets many things right. The bland, calculating ferocity of Panem’s leaders – who use the games to terrorize the half-starving masses and distract the luxury-addled ruling class – is persuasive as is the palpable fear and loneliness you can read on the children’s faces each time no one, except the audience, is watching.
Ross and the actress Jennifer Lawrence also get Katniss right. She is brave and resourceful, but she is not a preternatural self-confident and decisive Alpha girl. Katniss possesses an awkwardness and uncertainty that make her seem like a real teenager, too, although these qualities can also make Katniss a blank sometimes.
Woody Harrelson, as former Hunger Games’ winner Haymitch Abernathy and Katniss’ mentor, does more with a smaller role, suggesting both the damage the games have done to him and the caginess of a man who knows that the rulers of Panem still want to use him as a pawn.
Finally, and thankfully, the deaths of the Hunger Games participants’ are brief and discrete, rather than exploitive, although this discretion is much more about making the movie safe for mass consumption than it is about making a statement concerning the violence itself.
What The Hunger Games Gets Not-So-Right: Moral Quandaries and Teen Romance
Rendering The Hunger Games safe for mass consumption requires more than not lingering over the dramatization of children killing children, however.
It also requires contortions to prevent the moral depravity of the movie’s premise from tainting its heroine and our sympathetic identification with her (not to mention our willingness to pay $12.00 to watch fictional children slaughter each other).
To do this, the movie turns some of the Hunger Games’ victims into villains: specifically the kind of sadistic bullies that have populated movies for teenagers every since Hollywood started making movies for teenagers, except instead of insulting your clothes or hitting you in the nuts during dodge ball, they – you know – stab you in the heart with a sword.
This same requirement also demands that Katniss never have to make a morally compromised choice. She only directly kills one on the villain-victims as an instantaneous, defensive reflex. She is the indirect cause of the death of two other bullies, both of whom were threats to her. And she is the stalwart protector of the games’ youngest and most vulnerable participant as well as that boy with the crush on her, a doe-eyed but strapping young fellow by the name of Peeta.
Peeta is, of course, the other great concession the story makes to the imperative of mass consumption, in this instance to the ostensible requirement of young female audiences that a movie have a romance no matter how utterly out of place it is.
For example. When a girl is trapped in a high-tech colosseum run by dystopian dictators, what does she need more than food and shelter? More than medicine? More than better weapons or allies? More than a Deus-ex-machina revolution breaking out to save her?
She needs a boyfriend, apparently.
Anyhow, following the old formula, Peeta is sexually non-threatening, but following the newish formula (I’ll date it from the 1997 appearance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV), he is less lethal than Katniss, but still able to throw a pretty kick-ass sack of flour in a pinch. I’m not making that up.
So The Hunger Games distorts itself around the creation and preservation of this relationship, to the extent that even the ruthless despots running the Hunger Games are helpless before it.
When Katniss and Peeta decide to go Romeo-and-Juliet on the murderous bastards, rather than decide who will die for the other, the bastards cry “Uncle!” and declare both can live.
Thus it appears the moral of The Hunger Games is that when Power Lust throws down against Puppy Love – Puppy Love wins. It sure sells more tickets, in any case.
Peter Galen Massey 
In some ways, the Hunger Games is a subversion of the romantic paradigm you’re making fun of. Part of the point of the movie is that the viewers of the Hunger Games feel more connected to Peeta and Katniss because of their romance and that Katniss has to fake a romance that she doesn’t feel in order to avoid losing their sponsorship. However, that subversion is only partial. It’s kind of an effort to have one’s cake and eat it too. It winks at the silliness of the romance, but it indulges nonetheless.
Those are good points, but do you think the subversion is a deliberate strategy on the part of the film-makers? Because, as you can probably tell, I don’t. Corporations don’t lay down $80 million to subvert genre conventions; at least ones that want to stay in business don’t.
One of the things I like about Katniss, but didn’t say in the review because it didn’t fit, is how she didn’t seem to know how she felt about Peeta or what she wanted from him … which I thought was very appropriate for her age, and which would certainly account for some of the faking. How the target audience feels about Peeta is another matter. Being middle-aged, male, and hetero … I really can’t tell you.
I think that the subversion was a deliberate strategy on the part of the writer, Suzanne Collins (who used to be a writer for teen sit-coms like Clarissa Explains It All). And I think that the film-makers continued the subversion because the fans expected it. In general, I think that film-makers can sometimes be bold in playing with genre tropes, as long as they’re doing it in a marketable way (look at Quentin Tarantino’s movies, after all).
I haven’t read the books and am not likely to read them, and I’m unfamiliar with the expectations young women have for the romance genre, and am not likely to become familiar … so I’ll declare myself unqualified to discuss the topic further. (Which I mean in a sincere way, not a snarky way. Hope it didn’t come across snarky.) I can see your point more clearly with Tarantino, who I liked much better when he was interested in doing more than playing with genres. Recently – Inglorious Basterds comes right to mind – that seems to be his only interest.
I think you got the nail on the head in the sense that Katniss having a boyfriend is more or less a necessity for the movie. I haven’t read the book, but I was horrified at the idea of children killing each other – and not that Peeta’s role lessened that feeling, but it adds another dimension to the plot which made the movie easier to watch. I was pleasantly surprised after finishing the movie – I was sure it was going to be terrible quality, but I ended up thinking it was pretty good – in spite of the premise of the Hunger Games themselves, of course!
Thanks. Actually, the part I thought the best … because it was for me, as parent, the most unbearable … came after Rue’s death (which was not easy either). The scene shows the crowd from Rue’s district, forced to watch the games, and in the crowd is a man who I can only think was Rue’s father. He nods, take a few steps, and then explodes against Panem’s soldiers and starts a riot. Who can blame him? It’s those moments that made the movie, for me, much better than I expected. And if it had been all like that, well … it would have been something. But not a blockbuster.
Insightful comments Peter. I didn’t go to see the hunger games, because I thought the whole concept of teens killing teens was something monstrous. Probably a bit head in the sand… but I guess for some it worked.
As a concept for a movie, I think it’s fine because you don’t have to go far to find reasonably close real-life parallels (the boy soldiers of Sierra Leone, for example). As a concept for a mass-entertainment movie, it sure does get more dubious.
The film doesn’t really get going until they actually do get to The Hunger Games, but when it does get started up its entertaining, tense, unpredictable, and very well executed from Gary Ross. I also couldn’t believe that this was his 3rd film after other flicks such as Seabiscuit and Pleasantville, which are both good but are different from this one. Still though, great jobs from everybody involved and I cannot wait for the sequel. Good review Peter.
Thanks for the good feedback! As a film crafted to take you on a ride (for example, like Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers” which also came out this year), I agree with you that Ross did a good job. He also put the audience’s emotions more at stake, which I think is a good thing. But then he had to dance around some of the moral implications of the premise, which as you can tell gave me … and I believe him … some trouble, in different ways. These implications make The Hunger Games more interesting than The Avengers, too.