Great story, good movie.

Rating: 7/10 (20 August 2012)

I haven't read the book so I can't compare the two. One would imagine that since the author was involved in production, the movie is to some extent an accurate rendition of the author's intent. The story is well known so I won't summarize it here. There are two parts to this movie, the events prior to the actual hunger games and the hunger games themselves. In the preparatory part we get to know about the world this takes place in and a tiny bit about our characters.
The world of The Hunger Games is emphatically separated into two classes- the working class and the wealthy class. The working class has nothing and lives in a colorless misery comparable to those living during the Great Depression. The wealthy are a colorful, depraved and repugnant bunch and look like something out of a Mozart musical combined with a gay parade. They don't seem to do anything other than revel in opulence. A whole lot is made in speech about training the candidates and about them gaining sponsors although for the purposes of the movie and the hunger games all this doesn't really amount to much in the end. Our heroine, Katniss is your typical Hollwood powergrl- like a CEO wanna-be with rabies. She treats everyone around her like dirt and we are suppose to admire her for it.
Fortunately during the hunger game, Katniss becomes human and develops weaknesses, fear, and a heart. We learn almost nothing about the other participants/districts. One of them seems to house plenty of black people, and their candidates are also the good guys of course. The bad guys are the kids who represent some Sparta-type district that actually prepares their children for this monstrosity. They of course are the blonde blue-eyed devils. Fortunately we don't get to see a whole lot of child-on-child violence except earlier when a video of the games of the previous year is shown. The "games" themselves are terribly unfair by virtue of the random choosing of the kids. As a result you have adolescents fighting against children.
Performances are overall good in this movie. Stanley Tucci stands out the ludicrous fake TV host of the games' broadcast. His fake ultrawhite over-sized teeth, his nasty laugh, his colored hair that's not fake black-blue but blue blue, is a delightful mockery of the fakeness of the media and its worms with their larger than life personalities.
But the star of this movie is the story and how it maximizes social injustice to clarify it to audiences who probably don't understand that it exists. The vile and depraved upper class with its garish taste is not too far from what they look and act like in their gated conclaves. It's not enough that they have it all and that the workers and producers have nothing, they have to humiliate and debase them every year with this absurd ritual that sacrifices 23 children to discourage any future uprisings that could threaten the unjust status quo. There is some romance as well, which is tasteful, and well done and given Katniss' caricaturesque action heroine attitude, downright welcome. We also learn something about the thinking of those pulling the strings of the world. They don't want to offer much to those who have nothing, but a little bit of hope, but not too much. Direction is pretty good, but they could have cut some scenes short, and I'm sure there more background story, perhaps we'll learn about it in the sequels. It's good to see a movie aimed at young people that isn't entirely stupefying.