The ultimate "Zeitgeist" movie

Rating: 10/10 (26 March 2014)

The Hunger Games is the ultimate "Zeitgeist" movie (series). Zeitgeist is a German word, "Zeit" means "time" and "Geist" means "ghost" or "spirit", and "Zeitgeist" means "the spirit of the times". Nothing better captures the *feeling* of what it feels like to be alive in the 2010s.
I first noticed this in the first movie (warning: everything that follows contains spoilers) when they were in the Arena and it looked like a natural forest, but was being controlled behind the scenes by the gamemasters and was full of cameras for reality TV. This is just like what our virtual environments feel like -- it looks superficially like a normal thing, we're just interacting with our friends or whatever, but in reality the whole environment is artificially built by humans who manipulate everything behind the scenes for their own ends, financially, or politically, or what have you, and they don't tell us what they are doing or why, and we never get to know. We never meaningfully interact with the natural world any more, only with these artificial built systems. Whether it's a man-made system of rules that has taken on a life of its own, like our school system, or a system where the rules are encoded in software, like an online social network, we're always trying to guess the hidden rules and game the system, while the people who built the system try to change the rules and game the system themselves for their own advantage. And the "reality TV" angle is fitting, too, as any blunder we make online today can "go viral" and make us superstar-fools. The way the characters have to both compete brutally and sell themselves for sponsorships also seems to perfectly fit the way the world of today feels -- we have to be ruthless competitors to some while being the most friendly and amicable salespeople to others. That's all in the first movie but in this movie, Catching Fire, the world of the Hunger Games reveals itself to be a full-fledged ubiquitous surveillance society, just like our real world. When Katniss and Beetee are strategizing, Snow and Heavensbee are watching them and changing their own strategy in response. And it's not just in the Arena -- Snow can see Katniss everywhere in District 12. The surveillance is ubiquitous and so you never know when anything you say is being watched. Just like reality.
The parallels with our Zeitgeist go on. Our world feels like a weird mix of old and new technology. You never know when you'll have some amazing new solution to a task, a new mobile app or machine learning system, or when you'll have to fill out piles of paper forms. Similarly in the world of the Hunger Games, there's all this super-advanced technology -- maglev trains, hovercraft, the "Holodeck"-like training area in the Capitol -- yet the contestants fight with the most primitive of weapons, like bows and arrows. The mix of "old" and "new" extends to styles as well, in clothes, architecture, and so on, for example all the clothing styles in the Capitol are styles from the 1940s, done up to be more flamboyant, while the Hunger Games contestants wear modern styles.
The catchphrase "May the odds be ever in your favor" perfectly encapsulates the central contradiction of our times of how anyone can succeed at anything yet the odds are always against you because so small a percentage of the population actually do succeed. In the Hunger Games, "May the odds be ever in your favor" is always given to *all* the contestants. It's the ultimate cynicism. The odds can't be ever in everyone's favor by the very way The Hunger Games are set up.
Ultimately, we identify with Katniss because of her struggle to maintain her humanity, her compassion, in the face of a world, a society, that is hell-bent on turning her into the exact opposite. So it is in our real world, where we are pitted against one another in a giant, cutthroat, all-against-all competition.
Katniss demonstrates her compassion from the very beginning, when she volunteers as tribute in place of her sister Prim, through all her interactions with the other contestants, even to the "love triangle" that people like to talk so much about -- the "love triangle" in The Hunger Games is not like other movies, where it is just two men competing for one woman or vice-versa. In The Hunger Games we know from the beginning that Katniss is in love with Gale, and while the first movie leaves it ambiguous whether she loves Peeta or was faking it, when this movie opens we immediately know she was faking it -- but not out of malice, that was what kept both of them alive. At the end of this movie, we are left with ambiguity again, as to whether Katniss is starting to romantically love Peeta or whether she just cares about him deeply as a person.
I haven't read the books and of course the 3rd movie hasn't come out yet, so I say all this with a certain amount of trepidation, as the 3rd movie could veer off in some completely different direction, rendering my interpretations invalid. There's a "revolution" brewing at the end of the 2nd movie and if a "revolution" happens, that could mean The Hunger Games goes off in a direction that goes against the Zeitgeist of our time. Because at least here in the US, "revolution" is impossible -- the US has the world's largest prison population, the world's largest, most powerful and most militarized police, not to mention the world's most powerful and technologically advanced military. Perhaps the political system in the world of The Hunger Games is more fragile, and such a thing as a "revolution" is possible.
The Hunger Games series is a work of genius.