A decent depiction of indecency

Rating: 7/10 (22 April 2012)

A blockbuster movie about teens and preteens fighting to the death, from... the director of Pleasantville? Really? Pleasantville was a good movie but this sounds a world apart. Still, The Hunger Games has a decent IMDb rating, so I decided to give it a shot.
So the plot is that in a country (I assume the United States because of the accents) that had a civil war, the victorious districts annually force the defeated 12 districts to sacrifice 24 kids between the ages of 12 and 18 ("tributes"), and force them to fight to the death, with only one winner. Katniss, our hero, volunteers to fight in place of her younger sister.
To the movie's credit, there is bitter irony in the fact that the tributes are congratulated for being picked, that the sadistic woman with an accent called fighting an honour, that the whole games are called forgiveness of the rebellious districts just because there's a winner. Even if those districts rebelled, that doesn't justify executing 23 innocent kids every year after the war. As the movie conveys, the fact that people watch these games and enjoy them is fundamentally sick. This is a good concept. Adding to the sick factor is that we see some of these kids actually enjoy killing. A number of tributes team up to ambush a girl who made a fire- and then they laugh about it, mimicking her, saying "Please don't kill me!" Evil breeds evil.
But while some kids enjoyed killing so much, the idea of Katniss abstaining from killing except in defence is a little harder to swallow. Sounds suicidal to me; I didn't even think she grabbed a weapon until she took out a knife to drop a wasp's nest on other tributes. Not killing Rue is, however, quite understandable. The main weakness of the film is that suddenly allowing two winners breaks the film's own rules. Even if it were done, Peeta still should have died, killed by another player, by his injuries or by those poisonous berries at the end of the film. Letting both Katniss and Peeta live together happily ever after just feels unbelievable, a cheat. Overall, The Hunger Games is still a very decent movie: frightening, sardonic, and entertaining.