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SF-LIT  March 2012

SF-LIT March 2012

Subject:

Review of The Hunger Games

From:

Dennis Fischer <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Science Fiction and Fantasy Listserv <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:11:42 -0700

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Parts/Attachments

text/plain (133 lines)

“The Hunger Games”: A lightweight Twi-pocalypse
Jennifer Lawrence is spectacular in the spring's biggest movie -- but its vision 
of the future is addled and dumb
By Andrew O'Hehir 
 

In the world of “The Hunger Games,” the celebrity culture and media overload of 
our age have been rolled back to something that approximates the middle of the 
20th century, crossed with the Roman Empire. Instead of today’s narrow-casted 
onslaught of Internet, cable and satellite entertainment, there’s one TV channel 
and one reality show, which occupies the entire culture as nothing has in the 
real world since perhaps O.J.’s Bronco chase, or the Challenger disaster. In 
Panem, “Hunger Games” author Suzanne Collins’ nightmarish future version of 
America, it’s as if the first season of “Survivor” or “American Idol” is on the 
air year after year, with real killings, no competition and ratings that never 
go down.
It’s an interesting scenario, I suppose, but how did this happen? Nothing in 
Collins’ books, or in director Gary Ross’ simultaneously chaotic and desultory 
film adaptation, even tries to explain that (or seems aware of it as a narrative 
problem). Somewhere amid the civil war and widespread destruction and rise of a 
totalitarian state that forms the scanty back story of “The Hunger Games,” the 
collective knowingness and jadedness and pseudo-sophistication of the 
Information Revolution society has evaporated. Or at least it has among the 
subject populations, in the outlying districts annually compelled to supply 
young combatants to the Hunger Games. Where Collins’ heroine Katniss Everdeen 
(Jennifer Lawrence, in the movie) grows up, in the Appalachian coal-mining zone 
called District 12, willowy women in print dresses with flyaway hair live in 
tumbledown shacks, looking for all the world as if they just stepped out of a 
Dorothea Lange photo essay from 1937. (Have blue jeans for women and indoor 
plumbing been abolished, along with consumer society, corporate capitalism and 
postmodernity in general?)
If that sounds like too much intellectual heavy lifting to apply to a 
girl-centric action-romance that mashes up a bunch of disparate influences and 
ingredients, from Greek mythology to Orwell to Stephen King, well, it probably 
is. My point is that the patchwork of “The Hunger Games” never really holds 
together or makes any sense, except as an elementary fairy tale about a young 
girl’s coming of age and an incipient romantic triangle (which is the focus of 
the film, far more than the book). In Collins’ novel, the first-person narration 
and Katniss’ intense physical and psychological struggle seize center stage and 
overwhelm the threadbare situation, at least to some degree. Ross’ movie version 
— co-written by him, Collins and Billy Ray — is probably adequate to satisfy 
hardcore fans, but only just. It’s a hash job that offers intriguing moments of 
social satire and delightful supporting performances, but subsumes much of the 
book’s page-turning drama to sub-“Twilight” teen romance. Of course it will make 
a zillion dollars opening weekend, but I’m not convinced this franchise will be 
as ginormous, in the long run, as Hollywood hopes.
It’s easy to be seduced by something that’s both as clever and as successful as 
“The Hunger Games,” and to conclude that it must have something to say about 
violence and the media and changing ideas of femininity and other hot-button 
topics it appears to address. But as becomes even clearer in the movie version, 
it really doesn’t. It’s a cannily crafted entertainment that refers to ideas 
without actually possessing any, beyond an all-purpose populism that could 
appeal just as easily to a Tea Partyer as to a left-winger. If not more so — the 
true villain of “The Hunger Games” is the all-powerful state, and the population 
of Panem’s capital city (in Ross’ movie, and to some extent in the book too) is 
a decadent, affected and polysexual media elite, whose outrageous peacock 
fashions suggest the court of Marie Antoinette appearing in a Duran Duran video.
In fact, “The Hunger Games” is precisely the thing it pretends to disapprove of: 
a pulse-elevating spectacle meant to distract us from the unsatisfying situation 
of the real world, and to offer a simulated outlet for youthful disaffection and 
anxiety (in this case, the anxieties of girls and young women in particular). 
Bread and circuses, only without the bread, and pretending to be anti-circus. 
I’m not claiming that’s anything new in pop culture, and it certainly isn’t a 
crime. Furthermore, the shapeless politics of “The Hunger Games” have very 
little to do with the question of whether it’s any good, although they do 
illustrate how calculated the whole project is.
About one ingredient there can be little question: “The Hunger Games” announces 
Jennifer Lawrence’s arrival as an A-list movie star, likely at or near the level 
of “Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart. I’m not sure that Ross — a longtime Hollywood 
insider who co-wrote “Big” for Tom Hanks, and wrote and directed “Seabiscuit” — 
asks Lawrence to do half as much acting as she did in “Winter’s Bone,” but she 
commands the screen with effortless magnetism, a noble innocent who is gorgeous 
but not quite sexy, simultaneously a tomboy and a princess. As I saw clearly for 
the first time, the character is clearly meant to invoke Artemis, the Greek 
goddess of the hunt. When her younger sister’s name is drawn, against all odds, 
at the annual “reaping” for Hunger Games contestants, Katniss steps forward to 
take her place, beginning her appointment with destiny and her confrontation 
with the cruelty of the Capitol. She’s leaving behind her friend, hunting 
partner and maybe-kinda boyfriend Gale, played woodenly, or perhaps beefily, by 
smoldering male-model type Liam Hemsworth.
As Collins’ readers already know, Katniss must battle to the death against 23 
other “tributes” aged 12 to 18 — one boy and one girl from each of the 12 
subservient districts — in an arena that appears to be a natural outdoor setting 
but may not be. Now we know why Ross and the film’s producers didn’t show us any 
footage of the actual Hunger Games combat in advance: They hadn’t shot any until 
last week. OK, that’s unfair. Most of the book’s Games encounters are here, in 
abbreviated form, but Ross and company have streamlined the story and altered 
several details (some significantly), and the whole thing feels 
ultra-perfunctory. Almost no actual bloodshed is depicted (in deference to the 
required PG-13 rating), and during the fight sequences cinematographer Tom Stern 
relies on a wobbly, nonsensical, quick-cut style that leaves you utterly unsure 
about who has killed whom, and may have you squeezing your eyes shut to avoid 
throwing up. The problem really isn’t the lack of explicit violence; far more 
important, we get no sense of the hunger, thirst, cold, disease and harrowing 
physical torment undergone by Katniss and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the shy, 
blond District 12 baker’s son who has long loved her from afar. OK, they get a 
few superficial nicks and scratches, but they look as well-fed and runway-ready 
in the second half of the movie as they did at the beginning.
I have many more bones to pick with the Games — the Cornucopia, used by the game 
designers to lure contestants into a free-for-all? So bogus! — but when you pull 
back and look at the fripperies around the edges of Ross’ “Hunger Games,” it 
becomes much more entertaining and nearly worthwhile. Stanley Tucci is amazing 
as Caesar Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games broadcast. All of a sudden, 
this universe without media savvy becomes all about media savvy, all wrapped 
into this unctuous persona whose sincerity is so fake it becomes real (or the 
other way around), and whose dazzling smile is at once comforting and 
terrifying. As he so often can, Woody Harrelson turns Haymitch, a drunken past 
winner of the Games from Katniss’ district, into a fascinating and mysterious 
figure, even though the script gives him little to do. Wes Bentley plays a game 
designer who must frequently consult with Panem’s sinister president (Donald 
Sutherland, apparently playing Brigham Young), in expository scenes that aren’t 
in the book but provide helpful background.
I also dug Lenny Kravitz, playing a stylist named Cinna who grooms Katniss for 
the Games — the only person she meets in the decadent Capitol who has a shred of 
genuineness or integrity — and becomes her confidant. In his sly, androgynous 
sexiness, Kravitz has way more chemistry and connection with Lawrence than do 
Hemsworth or Hutcherson, playing the two lunkheads supposedly smitten with 
Katniss. I’d way rather watch a love story about Katniss and Cinna than the 
lightweight Twi-triangle inflicted on us by Ross, who has (with Collins’ 
permission, evidently) stripped his heroine of almost all her Artemis-like 
uncertainty about boys and romance. (In the book, you couldn’t be quite sure 
Katniss wasn’t a lesbian, at least at first.)
But we’re not getting Katniss and Cinna, of course, and we don’t get anything 
that feels remotely like an ending in this clunky, clumsy adaptation; the story 
reaches a certain point and the curtain simply drops. Wait another year and 
spend another $12, and you’ll get another chapter. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but 
that just seems mean (and neither the Harry Potter nor the “Twilight” series 
were quite this blatant about it). I realize it will probably work, or work well 
enough. “The Hunger Games” has some cool moments here and there, and is never 
entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven’t screwed 
it up badly enough to kill it, although they’ve tried. Go ahead and put that on 
your poster.

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