Hunger Games

Despite having had an otherwise busy Sunday, the wife and I decided to take in The Hunger Games last night. Of course, wanting to do it right meant seeing it in Imax on opening weekend, and, of course, that meant planning to arrive early enough to get seats in what we assumed would be a sold out showing. As a side note (of which there are likely to be many), I still miss the Arclight's assigned seating, which is perhaps one of the best ideas in movie-going history - but this is not about that.

She had not read the book; I read all three in a week. That week was particularly vexing for my wife, as I wanted to do little other than read, and read quickly without interruptions. I had given her a brief (by my standards) synopsis of the first book, and she saw a few trailers. And, while part of our experience was marred by the fact that temperatures in the Georgetown theater exceeded 90˚ throughout the forty-five minutes of previews and two-and-a-half hours of the film itself, neither of us came away liking the movie very much.

The age-old cliché of books being better than movies certainly held true for this novel-to-screen adaptation. I suppose I could just leave it at that, but perhaps it's more productive to go into detail about why that was the case. The film's rating, I'm sure, had plenty to do with the film's mediocrity. That isn't to say that all PG-13 movies are bad, and all R-rated movies are better, but much of what was compelling in the reading of The Hunger Games was lost in the film's glossy, MPAA-friendly treatment of the violence. Showing a little bit of blood with a zoomed-out or blurry killstroke was as close as the film got to acknowledging whole pages of description present in the print version. If the film had stuck to the story as written, there's no way the MPAA would have allowed it to be released as PG-13, and it seems clear, based on the previews before the movie (one for the next installment of Twilight, another for a Johnny Depp vampire movie) what target demographic producers were envisioning. There was a lot more than just content lost in the rating downgrade, whatever the box office upside. In a recent Entertainment Weekly article, director Gary Ross claimed otherwise:

"[T]he movie will be every bit as raw and harrowing as the reading experience. The scene [of the opening massacre at the Cornucopia] doesn't rely on splatter and gore but instead focuses on the frantic and vulnerable expressions of kids in a desperate state of fight of flight... 'You don't need to be gratuitous in order to be honest and capture the intensity of the book,' Ross, who co-wrote the script, says afterward. 'Is it violent? Yes. Do we back off from what it is? No, we don't. But I'm not interested in violence for violence's sake.'" (quoted from Entertainment Weekly #1197, March 9, 2012, p. 58).

That's a cop-out, and I think everyone who read the book would agree. It's not violence for violence's sake - it's violence for accuracy's sake. If the message Collins was trying to broadcast was that it's a messed up world, one in which war and violence cause people to do terrible things without justification, it gets lost when the brutality of it is blurred over as visceral reactions to violence are replaced by the nausea of shaky camerawork and soft focus. But this film is not about accuracy, either: as Collins herself put it, “I don’t write about adolescence,” she said. “I write about war. For adolescents” (as quoted in The New York Times, April 8, 2011: Suzanne Collins’s War Stories for Kids by Susan Dominus). Despite author Collins' involvement and co-writing credit, the film version skips several key elements of the book in the interest of expediency; with a final cut clocking in at an ADHD-unfriendly 2 hours, 22 minutes, it seems the producers missed the point. Any attempts to follow the formula of condensing a tween pop novel into a sub-120-minute package failed, but Ross, Collins, et al. managed to leave out important plot points despite running long. Consider the Mockingjay pin, which in the book comes from an emotionally loaded backstory, instead arriving onscreen in a junk drawer at the Seam. This detail almost could have passed if at least we'd gotten another piece of exposition from Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickermann explaining the historical significance of the Mockingjay. But it seems shortsighted for the opening movie of a franchise to place the one motif consistent throughout the trilogy as a happenstance find at a flea market, especially when the Mockingjay later becomes such an important symbol of rebellion [note that that can hardly be called a spoiler since the third installment bears the title "Mockingjay"].

One of the best parts of the book was hero Katniss' (and author Collins') general disdain for the production of reality television; although gradually Katniss learned to play to the cameras as a means of surviving, she still thought of the production itself as being an untrustworthy tool, despite her reliance upon it at times. The movie, however, again sort of sweeps these details under the rug, focusing instead on back-of-house CGI enhancements like the introduction of the Mutts into the game sphere. With the prevalence of television timeouts in football and hockey games, and the producers' influence in reality shows like The Bachelor, where often contestants are kept on merely as ratings boosters, it would have been nice to have seen a little more self-deprecating industry lampooning in The Hunger Games. The closest we got, though, was Haymitch's note to Katniss -- You call that a kiss? -- which references her using the tool of media to get what she wants. Given Collins' alleged inspiration from reality television interspersed with wartime footage, and the heavy emphasis on the Capitol's media-as-control in the books, it would have been nice to have seen more of this theme in the movie. But I suppose that in the end, sequences featuring this theme, like the Avoxes, the Mockingjay pin, the violence, and so much more, were just further scraps on the cutting room floor.