A successful franchise kicks off

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2012)

Following the "Potter" and "Twilight" transpositions of a series of young adult novels into a sequence of money-spinning movies, the gap in the market has surely been filled by "The Hunger Games", the first of three books from Suzanne Collins and the first of four films planned for the new franchise.
Set in the near future in a land once called North America and now named Panem, the games are an excessively grandiose and violent version of reality television in which 12 impoverished Districts are required annually to select at random one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 who will fight to the death, leaving only one survivor, simply for the entertainment of the pampered citizens of the Capitol. There are many other films that have deployed a similar theme, the one that comes most to my mind being "Rollerball" in 1975, but this version is created with panache and appeal with a mix of splendid sets, outrageous costumes, sustained tension, and a (barely) sufficient degree of violence.
At the heart of the novel and the movie is the selfless, brave and resourceful 16 year old Katniss Everdeen - the first name comes from a plant and the second from a character in a Thomas Hardy book. She is wonderfully acted by Jennifer Lawrence who was so brilliant in "Winter's Bone" and is clearly set for stardom. Josh Hutcherson is winsome enough as Peeta, the other District 12 "tribute", and there are some colourful adult support roles from the likes of Woody Harrelson and Stanley Tucci.
For me as an adult viewer, the only real problem was the violence - or lack of it. In order to secure a PG13 rating in the US and a 12A rating in the UK and enable the age group at which the book is aimed to see the movie, the amount of gore had to be contained, but this takes the edge off what should be a horrific set of encounters and certainly "Rollerball" hit much, much harder on this score.