The Gods demand sacrifice. The Gods are always demanding sacrifice.

Rating: 6/10 (18 June 2012)

If plain entertainment is your cup of tea and you are in your teens, and if you take lightly to kids killing kids in a game intended for entertainment for the masses, then go for it. Apart from some good acting by the pleasant looking Jennifer Lawrence, whose character development this movie revolves around, there is not much to commend in it. A shaky, inconsistent and incoherent plot, only a couple of good dialogs and jerky action scenes are what characterize it. There are no really good ideas in it, and a couple of very bad ones. The first bad idea is that a contest in which all but one of the participants are killed by the others can be called any sort of 'game' by any stretch of imagination. The correct term is clearly 'war' if the movie is to be taken seriously. (Perhaps in the post- postmodern dystopia words have entirely new meanings, or totally hazy meanings.) The idea that games can be a substitute for war is a good idea, but only if these games are not fatal, or are fatal only exceptionally. The other bad idea is that children are forced by lottery to participate in this death contest (notice that nobody volunteers, and the only exception is also motivated by the desire to save her sister). This is similar to the 'archaic man's' (Jung) worst habits of trying to please the gods by ritual human sacrifices that were almost never voluntary. The popularity of the Hunger Games books and now this movie could be that it stirs that archaic visceral excitement of seeing people being sacrificed as tribute or to please the powers that were presumed to be, so that those powers (gods) give the cult, community or tribe a bountiful harvest so that they don't go 'hungry'. Let me bring some rational balance here by pointing out that these archaic practices did work in exceptions, and only if a powerful person of the community sacrificed something voluntarily with a pure heart and impeccable motive. In all other cases, it was a perverse ritual that had bad consequences for the community, but which was not to be realized by the perpetrators of the ritual. Does watching this movie ring a bell?