like Harry Potter 1, at least we have a start

Rating: 6/10 (30 November 2015)

The Hunger Games books were surprising for me in simply the way that I was recommended them not by teenagers but by adults my own age (late 20's/early 30's). It's a series that is marketed for the 'young adult' market, and it does have a strong female protagonist and a romantic love-triangle and things like that. But it's far less in the tradition of Twilight - Suzanne Collins can right and craft characters and make a strong, interesting point of view (Katniss narrates all three of the books) - than it does stuff like The Running Man or even The Long Walk (the Bachman books set in dystopia) or of course 1984 and things like that. It's grim, it's desolate, it's pitiless, and the "Capital" is a place where people there (under President/Dictator Snow) create a sense of pageantry and pomp and colorful dresses and of course TELEVISION all while the Hunger Games are a series of death matches pitting teenagers against one another from 12 different districts.
We know from the moment we see Katniss she'll be fine - this IS more than one book that we know of going into this first film, after all - but what is exciting is seeing how she gets out of the predicaments she gets in, how her hunting background and being a hunter on her own time, and just having a thickened skin from years of oppression and mind-screwery from propaganda, and the ways that people DIE. And sometimes these deaths of people are really miserable and rather wild; the one that stuck with me from both the book and the film involved a particular breed of bees/wasps, and that's all I'll say about that if you haven't seen the film.
From the start the real strength in this film is Jennifer Lawrence in the lead of Katniss. She makes the center of the film so strong and captivating - a lot of it is what she holds back, has to internalize, which is always interesting when an actor can do that well - and so around her she gets actors that vary in quality from really tremendous (Sutherland, Banks, even Stanley Tucci in an over the top TV personality performance), and maybe OK ones, adequate ones that can get the movie rolling along (Hutcherson and Hemsworth really). But what is the weakness is that the filmmaking isn't that strong; Gary Ross and his DP Tom Stern and his three editors have taken an R movie, or what should be that due to the quality of the violence (it is vicious, just a step below its Japanese step-cousin Battle Royale), and made it into a PG-13 flick. It's still brutal at times, but it's in such a way that feels cheating and jarring, like Ross watched a bunch of Bourne movies to prep and doesn't really know how to shoot this stuff coherently.
In other words, The Hunger Games disappointed me on a technical level, and sort of rushed through a few points that the book made more heartbreaking (a character named Roo gets a moment but not quite enough), and yet the acting saves a lot of the experience and there's a sense of satire that sneaks up on you where you don't necessarily expect it. It at first appears to be a much darker experience than mainstream audiences - I mean the MALL crowd, not just genre fans, this is meant for as many people as possible - but the sense of play with the world, how it doesn't steer away from the reality TV aspect, that it sort of embraces the conventions reality TV creates while skewering them, is creative and cool.