Classic novels captivate the teen audience like nothing else. Twilight, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, the list goes on and on (the best for my money, sans Harry Potter, has yet to be recognized. The book series called Bone. Read it, you won’t be disappointed). These books have relatable characters and themes with larger than life situations. Done right (Harry Potter, Bone), they juxtapose our own lives with fantasy. Done wrong (Twilight), soap opera like plots replace actual story and leave readers feeling underwhelmed.
The latest in this craze is Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which arrived in theaters this past Friday to extreme fanfare and record-breaking box office numbers (it made more than $150 million in the opening weekend alone). However, the quality of the film still remains a big question mark, so how good is it?
For those who haven’t read the book, it takes place in Panem, a version of North America in the future. In this time, the whole country has been divided up into twelve socialist-style districts. As punishment for an uprising of districts 74 years in the past, each district must submit an adolescent boy and girl (via random lottery) to fight to the death in the widely publicized and televised event called “The Hunger Games.”
This annual event is a huge affair in the wealthy city known simply as “The Capitol,” which has considerable power over all twelve of the districts. In the coal-mining society known as District 12, Katniss Everdeen takes care of her broken family as well as she can. But when her young sister is chosen for “The Hunger Games,” she volunteers to take her place and fight to the death in the spectacle. Along with Peeta (the male chosen from District 12), she will soon learn what it means to survive and what truly comes from insider herself.
As a huge fan of the books (read the first one twice!), I was excited to see how this adaptation would go over. What struck me first of all is that, as a stand-alone film, this thing fails epically. To truly understand the books and characters, you’ll have to read the books themselves. Unlike the Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings movies, these adventures just can’t stand on their own two feet.
The biggest example of this comes in the form of Haymitch. In the books he’s the comical anti-hero, the “Han Solo-ish” lovable rogue. While his past won’t into light until the third book (Mockingjay), plenty of personality still shines through. In the film though, he comes off as a stereotypical comic relief, with no other higher purpose served. He comes off as one-sided, and that goes for several other characters as well.
My biggest beef (along with the violence) is with Peeta. The flashbacks showing his importance to Katniss are clumsy and come off as stilted and forced. It reminded me of one of the flaws in Disney’s most recent flop, John Carter: we never sympathized with that titular character because we never found out why he was the man he was until it was too late into the flick. Similarly, we feel no sympathy for Katniss or Peeta because we have no reason to root for them.
Unlike in similar movies, I never felt like I went on a journey with Katniss. What bothered me the most was that she never changed! Not once does she have to change her ways or make some difficult decision in the arena. The best we get is a barely set up “romance” with Peeta that never even pays off like it should. You never felt any connection to the character and I was left bored with her after two and a half hours. She’s just a cardboard cutout, with no real reason to feel like she has to survive the fearsome “Hunger Games.”
In addition, there is a major recurring problem in the film: the world these characters inhabit is much too complex for cinema. To be frank, what works in books doesn’t always work in movies and The Hunger Games may remain, for years to come, as the shining example of failing to translate a successful novel onto the silver screen.
There were good things in this mess, specifically the acting of Stanley Tucci as TV host Caesar Flickerman. He plays the character to a tee and is by far the best thing in it. Jennifer Lawrence finds some good things in the muddled mess of Katniss. Donald Sutherland finds good time to set himself up as a big baddie President Snow. I enjoyed many of the set pieces and the costume designs were simply fantastic. There’s also a nice scene involving an uprising that I enjoyed and felt was the highlight of the picture.
However, they can’t disguise perhaps the biggest dud of 2012 so far. It may not be as bad as Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, but it definitely is a bigger let down than any other film I’ve seen so far this year. The books are fantastic, but the odds are certainly not in this film’s favor.
