Dystopic Disney Gladiators

Rating: 4/10 (17 June 2013)

I've not read the book so I can only say what I thought of the film.
The story takes place in a future, post-apocalyptic version of the USA, where the ruling classes live in a plush central district which brutally dominates 11 satellite districts. Every year a gladiatorial games is held where 2 children from each district fight to the death until just one victor emerges. This seems to be a punitive measure for some past episode of civil disobedience.
Selected from a lottery, the children are taken into the central district, groomed and sent out into a giant outdoor woodland arena to do combat while the public vicariously follows their progress via a sick reality TV spectacle akin to "Big Brother". A central stash of weapons and supplies is provided to fuel the bloodbath. If the contestants are lucky enough to have courted the favour of sponsors during their grooming period, they may receive additional ad hoc supplies from them throughout the contest.
There's *boatloads* of potential for an interesting story given the initial setup. What I had a problem with here was the cowardly way in which this was handled - wanting to appall us with a deeply shocking idea but lacking the courage to follow through with the required delivery.
Instead we're served up all the usual clichés. e.g. the central righteous character doesn't have to partake in any of the vicious butchery, trickery or deception that would normally be required for her to win such a contest. Instead serendipity seems to blissfully watch over her throughout. She's even allowed to play big sister to a little kid that under normal circumstances she'd eventually have to murder or be murdered by, but of course that problem, along with just about every other unsavoury permutation, is conveniently magicked away by the Hollywood fairies so that she remains a whiter-than-white beacon of virtue, and nothing too unpleasant happens to spoil our entertainment or derail the good versus bad morality tale.
I do give them points for making her vulnerable and not some karate-kicking amazonian warrior, but her luck was just too good to be true, and events just too unbelievably convenient. This killed off any empathy or belief in the possibility of realism and transformed the whole thing into a cartoon action movie.
Many of the usual sex/race stereotypes are played out. I won't expound on that as I have a 1000 word limit here but I think it's pretty obvious.
One of the more unbelievable aspects was the kids from the central district who we are to believe have spent all their lives preparing for this contest. However their attitudes and demeanour didn't reflect that at all. For starters I would've thought tracking would be high on the curriculum for anyone preparing for this contest given the terrain over which it takes place. Yet they seemed to be blindly fumbling around for most of the contest, quite unable to locate our heroine who was able to hide, recuperate, wander around freely for the most part. The one time they did bump into her, instead of going for the quick, low energy, low risk kill, they hesitate for some reason and proceed to take all kinds of unnecessary risks, eventually leading to the injury and death of some in their group. Again, no signs of any kind of training. Just clumsy, clueless raging idiots.
It's hard to believe that after so many annual games, this is the first time someone volunteered to replace somebody else - so no older brothers or sisters for *all* those young kiddies who were chosen then? Tough to imagine.
The use of repeated scenes was poor in my opinion. I'm not averse to that mechanism in movies but here it seemed to serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever, but instead broke up the flow and left you trying to figure out what the hell that was all about while you missed what came next.
I quite liked the reality-TV-meets-roman-games kind of take on the whole thing. That part was sickeningly believable and disturbing.
I also liked some of the styling of the movie - the vulgar hi-tec opulence of the hegemonical central district versus the antiquated penury of its satellite districts. Nice touches on the fashion as well.
Jennifer Lawrence was pretty good in the main role - she was well cast. Josh Hutcherson was OK but his character wasn't interesting - he just filled a space. Woody Harrelson's character was an oddity - a mocking amoral drunken slob laughing in the faces of the 2 kids he was supposed to be mentoring at the beginning. Then for no apparent reason he morphs into a socially conscious protective sage. Bad writing.
I thought Donald Sutherland and Wes Bentley were wasted as clichéd villains but I guess someone had to play those parts.
All things considered, this was well-made and well-acted with some very memorable scenes, so it could well be that my problem here is either with the source material or the screen re-write. As I've not read the book I'm simply not in a position to say, so for that reason I've given it a higher mark. If there was no book though I'd happily give it a 2 instead.
Overall, this was a weak film that completely failed to capitalise on a powerful central premise, badly attempting to complement shocking spectacle with unrealistic stereotypes and offensive fantasy morality that belongs in a fairy tale story, not a story that's supposed to be about making children fight to the death for survival.