Big Cinema circus/hype that *almost* stilled my hunger

Rating: 6/10 (16 February 2015)

I'm only in my early thirties, but extremely grumpy and old-fashioned for my age. I'm a giant admirer of classic horror/cult cinema and thus consequently a hater of everything that falls under the category of popular new teenage age trends, including remakes of classic horror movies and ridiculously over-hyped and phony franchises (like "Twilight", for instance). I automatically assumed that "The Hunger Games" would fall under this last subcategory and thus decided not to waste any time or money on it, but then it came on television and I had nothing better to watch, so what the hell. I must admit that I was quite entertained by this first movie in the franchise and – contrary to what I feared –compared to "The Hunger Games", any entry in the "Twilight" saga looks like an episode of the "Teletubbies". Obviously I still think this movie is tremendously overrated and I didn't like it enough in order to run out and immediately purchase all the other sequels right away, but at least I was pleasantly surprised by the overall grim & depressing atmosphere, the brutality of some of the death sequences and the execution of the basic story concept. Speaking of which, the plot is as old as cinema itself and absolutely doesn't anything original. Back in 1933 already, there was a fabulous movie that dealt about the hunting-humans formula – entitled "The Most Dangerous Game" – and since then there came copious of rip-offs, imitations or variants. Some of them are cheap and dull ("Bloodlust!"), some of them are sleazy ("The Women Hunt"), some of them are extremely violent ("Blood Camp Thatcher") and some of them became legendary cult classics themselves ("Battle Royale"). Some of them already even integrated the sub plot of the hunting game being one giant reality TV show, like "The Running Man" and Lucio Fulci's obscure piece of Sci-Fi trash "The New Gladiators". Basically that's all "The Hunger Games" is; another umpteenth re-telling of "The Most Dangerous Game", except this time it's based on a novel that all teenagers across the world have read and loved, so they think it's unique and groundbreaking. It's definitely innovating at all, but I'm already glad that it became a thriller with a a reasonably disturbing dystopian setting, a fair amount of suspense, intense situations and above average acting performances. Somewhere in the (not too distant) future, the nation of Panem – which is whatever is left over from the United States – is divided into 12 districts, ranged from proud and powerful to pitiable and poor. Once per year, the authorial president Snow organizes the "hunger games"; a big media circus in which 24 randomly selected participants, two from each district, and unleashed into a wilderness where they battle each other to the death. In District 12, Katniss Everdeen volunteered to take the place of her younger sister, and she also happens to be a cool chick and a brilliant archer. There's quite a lot of additional blah blah and uninteresting sub plots, but I will admit that "The Hunger Games" contains a handful of impressive action sequences in the jungle and even a few shocking moments in spite of its PG-13 rating. The apotheosis is utterly weak, which is inevitably I suppose, and the use of computer-engineered effects (the mutated dog- pack attack, for example) is terribly annoying, but perhaps this is all linked to me being a sourpuss. As for the remaining installments in the series, I will patiently wait until they get aired on TV as well.