Movie Review of The Hunger Games (2012)

Every year, twenty-four teenagers are set against each other in a fight to the death. Only one may remain standing, in order to win the crown and end the game.

The whole gladiatorial battle takes place under the full glare of the cameras. Television audiences bet on the winner, discuss it incessantly and, if they're feeling kind, pay for supplies to be parachuted in for their favorite contestant.

Such gifts can mean the difference between life and death. The lack of sponsors almost certainly means that the individual is doomed. So they each have to remain likeable, while slaughtering their peers.

These are the Hunger Games, now into its 74th year. It's a massive spectacle, watched live by everyone around the world. But it's not merely gruesome television entertainment. It's a punishment too.

The young people trapped there are not volunteers, they are tributes. Their names have been pulled from hats and they've been summoned to participate. They each represent their District's sacrifice, in compensation for an historical uprising against the ruling Capitol.

They are aged between twelve and eighteen, with the Capitol allowing one to survive because 'hope is a more powerful emotion than fear'. The eventual victor will receive food and water for the rest of their lives - both scarce commodities in this dystopian, futuristic world.

The Hunger Games is set in the region of Panem. It's not stated, but the implication is that this is North America, thousands of years into the future.

If so, then it's safe to say that the American Dream finally collapsed into nightmare.

There is no social mobility here. There are (or were) thirteen Districts, each encapsulating just one trade, one export, one condition.

The Capitol rules over all with an iron fist. District 1 provides luxury items and its citizens are wealthy. Fashion rules and they want for nothing. This distribution gets less in increments, until District 12 is in abject poverty, living in a state of perpetual hunger.

There was a District 13, which initiated a revolution 74 years ago. No-one has heard a thing from them, since that failed. The belief is that the whole area was obliterated.

You live your lives and die in the District into which you were born. Control over your livelihood is absolute. Attempting to leave will result in instant death. But worst of all, once a year, each District must send one girl and one boy, between the ages of 12 and 18, to compete in The Hunger Games.

Real life does not have reality shows that actively kill its contestants live on TV. But it's close enough.

The movie is based on a trilogy of books of the same name, written by Suzanne Collins. She explained to Publishers Weekly that the inspiration came from channel-hopping one night with the television.

She saw a reality TV show interspersed with live footage of the invasion of Iraq. The images 'blurred' and emerged on the other side of her imagination in The Hunger Games.

Watching the movie, I could certainly see what she meant. The themes of war, poverty, suffering and spectacle run as deep as the coal-seams from District 12 in this story.

As reality shows become more extreme, then it really does seem just a matter of time before they also become deadly. The boundaries get pushed in that direction over and over again. But this is not a new insight. Such themes have already been visited in Stephen King's The Running Man and Ben Elton's Dead Famous, not to mention the Bad Wolf episode of Dr Who.

What sets The Hunger Games apart is that the reality show is seen in the wider context of social inequality and war. It aligns those entertainment programs alongside the news channels. Is there really a big difference, in the perception of viewers, between watching footage from war-torn nations and Big Brother?

They both show individuals struggling to survive against the odds ('may the odds be in your favor' is a common slogan in the movie), reliant upon their own wits, will and talent, but also on the whim of the television audience.

Only the stakes change. It may be a telephone vote, or a charitable donation. A refugee gets water or a tent. The contestant gets to stay in the competition for another week. They're both seen through the same glowing box in the corner of our living rooms.

It was a clever, if darkly observed premise for a story.

The first book in the trilogy was published the year after Recession hit the global economy. The film was released a year after the Occupy Movement had pushed social inequality into world headlines.

The Hunger Games is patently a more extreme reading of real life, but there are some cross-over themes. It's merely the scale (or is that the honesty) which has shifted. That mirroring of reality will certainly strike a chord in audiences, which might account for its huge popularity.

I was about to write that it's only a matter of time before we see Occupy the Hunger Games as an internet slogan. But I'm too late. The Facebook page already exists; and the news headlines are full of criticism for Gossip Girl actor Penn Badgley for making similar observations.

He's quoted widely as saying, "It's the one percent [killing the kids]. I think you'd have to be blind to not see that. I was shocked to see all that in there." Before advocating revolution for both the main characters and, by implication, real society.

I have no idea who this man is. The comments imply that it's not 'cool' to listen to a word he says. He's called it spot on, from my own personal observations.

This isn't to say that Suzanne Collins, nor the movie's directors, set out to immortalize the Occupy Movement in celluloid. They are two parallel reactions to the same social backdrop. There are no protest camps in The Hunger Games; though the undertones of revolution are there, boiling beneath the surface.

The same real world undoubtedly inspired both cultural expressions though. While Occupy shine a light on the reality of the wealthiest 1% controlling and exploiting the masses; Collins wrote a story which depicts just that. And both became extremely popular, because the reading/watching/disenfranchised public patently identify with their central message.

Or, as the Libertines put it in Time for Heroes, 'We will die in the class that we were born, but that's a class of our own, my love.'

Men have long since had a host of action heroes with whom to identify.

To say that Hollywood has been a little remiss in providing the same for women is an understatement.

The fact that females normally occupy only cliched, supporting roles is so well-known that there's even an established check.

The Bechdel Test requires that there are:

1. Two (named) women in the film;
2. Who talk to each other...
3. ... about something other than men.

The Hunger Games might just about qualify! Just...

The main character is Katniss Everdeen. She's strong, skilled and extremely clever. She's almost too good to be true, but who cares. She's female and she has the central role.  There are also several other women, all named, scattered throughout the script.

They even talk to each other. Katniss and Primrose, and Katniss and Rue, have whole conversations. None of them are about men. They're mostly about staying alive against the odds. But both Primrose and Rue are twelve year olds. Do they still count as 'women'?

There is a scene where Katniss talks at her mother. Not much is said in return, but again it's not about men. It's about Mrs Everdeen not having a nervous breakdown under the strain of being left to raise her youngest daughter alone. There is an earlier actual conversation, but that's just her mother telling Katniss to put on a dress, so she'll look pretty at the Reaping. Not brilliant Feminist messages there, but nevertheless, just scraping by on the Bechdel Test.

Unfortunately, every one of the really meaty scenes involve dialogue between Katniss and an array of supporting male characters.

I was thrilled to see Katniss Everdeen representing the ladies up on the silver screen. But the great push for proper female representation still fell slightly short.

Ultimately, the main test of any movie should be whether it entertained, moved and sustained the attention of its audience until the final credits rolled.

Yes. The Hunger Games most certainly did that.

There were times when I even forgot to eat my nachos, as I was so absorbed in the story on the screen. There were scenes when tears slid down my cheeks; and others when I bit back a cheer.

My teenage nephew and I left the cinema filled with discussion about what we'd just witnessed. That conversation didn't dry up once all of the way home, as we compared our views on things that had happened and the mix of personalities.

We were both glad that we'd been to see it. We both wanted to watch the second and third films right now. We were both looking to buy the books, so we could read for ourselves the trilogy that had inspired it.

At the end of the day, isn't that precisely the kind of reaction that any film-maker or cinema-goer wants from a movie? In which case, The Hunger Games wins hands down.