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Film: The Hunger Games

Country: USA

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Gary Ross

Screenwriters: Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins, Billy Ray

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Donald Sutherland, Stanley Tucci, Wes Bentley

Review: Peter Machen

♥♥♥½

For those readers who’ve been hiding beneath the proverbial rock for the last couple of years, The Hunger Games is based on the massively successful series of novels by Suzanne Collins. Directed at young adults, the novels have acquired a far wider audience, although I should acknowledge that that audience has thus far excluded me, despite the series’ tantalising premise.

Like the novels, the film is set in a dystopian reality in which a continent that is named Panem – but looks like pre-war England – is divided into 12 districts. Seventy-five years ago, the districts rose up in a failed but bloody revolution. Now, every year, as a kind of memorial-based penance, the districts must offer up two teenage ‘tributes’ to take part in the annual Hunger Games, in which they must fight to the death.

The film focuses on the brave and independent Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) from the poverty-stricken mining community of District 12. When her sister is chosen to participate in the games, the steadfast Katniss volunteers to takes her place. Accompanied by Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the strong but sensitive son of the local baker, Katniss leaves the district for the bright lights and terror of the Hunger Games.

From there, the film descends into the reality-TV based template that clearly inspired the novels. On a very simple level, the film is simply reality TV taken to a particularly brutal but logical end. All of the structures of a series such as Survivor are intact, with the show’s MC interviewing the tributes, discussing their chances with various experts, and manipulating the show’s outcomes with unexpected changes in the rules.

The Hunger Games is largely Jennifer Lawrence’s film and it’s a credit to the film’s producers that this restrained young actress was chosen for this kind of blockbuster production. Hutcherson, despite his baby-faced beauty, plays second fiddle, both due to his place in the narrative and to Lawrence’s powerful onscreen presence. The two young actors are joined by a supporting cast that includes Donald Sutherland and Stanley Tucci as members of the ruling class which facilitates the Games, both camping it up to a fair degree.

The Hunger Games isn’t a brilliant film, but compared to most of the recent franchise outings, it’s a relative masterpiece, infinitely more textured and intelligent than, say, the Twilight series. (And while the actors are certainly attractive, their good looks are not the central purpose of the film). Indeed it’s refreshing to watch a heavily hyped blockbuster movie that actually has something to say about the world outside the cinema.

Not that The Hunger Games is even slightly didactic or preachy. For most of its duration, it is essentially an action movie like any other, but the context it provides – a context that is drawn directly from 21st century society – is deeply thought provoking. The moments of direct politics in the film might be rendered with a dash of hamminess, but they are also serious in their discussion of spectacle and social control. Brief scenes of rioting echo the food riots that have taken place around the world in the last few years, and while the films central use of food and hunger as a form of social control is millennia old, it is also one of the key battlegrounds for contemporary politics in the 21st century.

The idea of human lives as a broadcast sideshow has long been a staple of science fiction, and there are many films which preceded and effectively predicted the dominance of reality TV. But in today’s world, The Hunger Games is broadly realistic, except for its premise of fatality, and it’s tempting to ask in a televised age what the difference is between death and being voted off the island or the cookery show or out of the Trump Towers.

Finally, I can’t help but point out that the brutality of the film’s premise – that 23 human lives could be sacrificed every year as part of a political system – is tame in comparison to a global system of radical inequality that has allowed a hundred or so children to die of malnutrition in the time it took you to read this review.