Hunger Games - More than Survivor meets Big Brother

Rating: 7/10 (24 March 2012)

The Australian Broadcasting Commission TV critic was scathing about the shaky hand held camera ( a pet hate of his) and what he described as poor direction. Had it not been for the local newspaper critic's rave review I would not have attended.
It was a very young audience and I figured I was in for a noisy viewing. But surprisingly, the audience was almost funereal. Almost reverent attention would be an apt description.
I was an interested viewer, but I noted that I was not in that state of anxious suspense that a really well made film can evoke. That may have been the root of the complaint about poor direction. That and the camera work. It was not the shaky camera I noticed - even though it made some of my YouTube efforts look positively rooted-to-the-earth stable. It was the surprisingly soft focus, lack of sharply defined clarity of some of the forest scenery.
It struck me that the author (and screen writer) may have picked a rich vein of young viewer familiar context by setting her political thriller up as a sort of Survivor - Big Brother television show. That might explain the lack of palpable, visceral tension. (at least until they released the hounds). Maybe kiddies are used to the long, drawn out, only occasionally exciting Big Brother format. Maybe people forming and dissolving strategic alliances has replaced the ongoing, inescapable terror.
But there is more to Hunger Games than a new take on the Survivor formula It has at its hearth the idea that our culture has no problem with sending its sons and daughter out to engage in killing each other for no truly worthwhile purpose. (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). Those of us who have heard the late Howard Zinn could extend that back to World War II and from there, to the very dawn of "civilisation".
I am told that the subsequent novels in the series reveal a heroine toying with the idea of rejecting that barbarous notion and demanding that it be re-examined and changed. You don't get that with the Survivor television shows, or the vampire teen movies, so bring it on.