Action film "Hunger Games" dodges action scenes
Actress Jennifer Lawrence in the movie "The Hunger Games" / AP GraphicsBank/Lions Gate Films Inc.
(The New Republic) There are several spoilers in this review of "The Hunger Games," and I'll get them out of the way early. The film shows precious little hunger and no sense of game. It's a terrible movie, but it grossed $68.25 million on its first Friday. So that's where your teenage daughters were over the weekend -- or what they told you. And that's why film critics sometimes feel their own futility.
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I know, or I have heard, that the series of books by Suzanne Collins, of which "The Hunger Games" was the first, have sold all over the world in amazing numbers since 2008. I am amazed and daunted, and I might have tried reading one of them if the movie had suggested anything perverse or interesting. Even now, I can see that the plot motif, of teenagers in a contest where they must kill one another, might threaten sentimental ideas of what children are or ought to be. But the only way this movie takes on that issue is to disguise it, in case it interferes with the commercial inevitability that came to fruition on that first Friday (known at Lionsgate, the film's distributor, as Good Friday).
The film places us in a post-apocalyptic world, though there is no sign of how the end came and no trace of a toxic aftermath. So the apocalypse is just a pretext for a peasant community lorded over by an eccentric super race and their police force. The rulers have whatever technologies the script needs; the ordinary people have very little, except bread, humble virtue (as in silent cinema), and waiting for the lottery. Every year, the ruling class put on a show: Teenagers from the twelve districts are selected at random to engage in mortal combat. Only one will survive.
Katniss Everdeen (the names do seem to have been affected by fall-out) becomes one of the contestants when she volunteers to take the place of her younger sister in the Games. I gather that in the book Katniss is 16, but here she is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who is 21. A couple of years ago, this actress was the lead in "Winter's Bone," and just a year ago she did a good job in "The Beaver." There were teenage girls at the "Hunger Games" screening I saw who were in raptures over the movie Katniss, but I'm disappointed. Lawrence has great ability, and the publicity says she got in shape for this adventurous role. Still, she looks as well-fed or un-hungry as a star player on the UCLA water-polo team, and as placid or chlorinated.
"The Hunger Games" cast takes NYC
This could be a great role: a kid fighting for her life, meeting her first love, and trying to survive in the woods (they shot in North Carolina). The film should have suspense, fear, and desperation, all focused on Katniss, but Lawrence seems reserved and biding her time -- she has signed on for all four films in the series, and her rewards must be stupendous. I hope she won't forget that in "Winter's Bone," where she probably had little more than per diem money, she got an Oscar nomination for a portrait of rural courage and persistence. If you want a bold, dangerous young woman who can look after herself (and it's easy to understand that role model appealing to our daughters), I'd still go for Rooney Mara as Lizbeth Salander.
The handicaps reach further. Before I saw "The Hunger Games" I had to watch a trailer for "The Hobbit" (coming at Christmas), and it's clear that this return to Tolkien is going to indulge Peter Jackson's eye for the romantic grandeur of wild New Zealand scenery. The forest is the essential setting for "The Hunger Games" and there is a lot of tracking through the trees. But it's drab, a cheesy and unimaginative landscape compared with Jackson's work or Michael Mann's vision of the outdoors in "The Last of the Mohicans." Katniss climbs trees to escape from marauders, but we seldom feel we're in trees, and there's very little animal life.
But the greatest shortcoming is in the matter of combat. Whether the filmmakers like it or not, this is a story about kids killing other kids with knives, bows and arrows, and anything else they can get their hands on. If you don't like that violence, and if you fear it will jeopardize the box office, then don't do the story. Instead, the woeful director Gary Ross has elected to present the combat as a mess of trembling hand-held close-ups, rapid cuts, and an overall blurring, so that in effect we don't see the action. To my mind this is nearly un-American: From Ford and Hawks, through Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann, to Coppola and Scorsese, our cinema has reveled in what is called "action" and made it something close to a philosophy. But in "The Hunger Games" you feel these scenes are like ink smudged in the rain. Perhaps it was calculated to get a PG-13 rating; perhaps Ross is a chump as a director (he made a similar hash of "Seabiscuit"); perhaps the script, by Ross, Suzanne Collins, and Billy Ray (who wrote "Shattered Glass") never settled on the level of terror or savagery it was trying for. $68.25 million in a day is not going to persuade them to try harder on three more films.
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David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and "The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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"So the apocalypse is just a pretext for a peasant community lorded over by an eccentric super race and their police force"
Oh yes! How absurd a premise. Um, David, this is what is called an oligarchy and any one familiar with human history doesn't find it difficult to envision a future where an oligarchy could use advanced technology to wield total domination over the majority of the population. This is what is happening today to a lesser and more subtle degree.
I loved the movie, up until the Hunger Games started. Then it all went downhill. I felt no sense of urgency from Katniss, no doubt in my mind that she would survive. Yes, I KNEW she would win, but there are certain movies that pull the suspense off so well that you start to doubt that you know.
I am curious to see how the box office will be for next week.
And yes, I have read the books and loved them.
But it's all relative. You can't make an honest assessment of a book-based movie without reading the book itself. For those who have read the series, it's extremely exciting...and of course those people are the first to notice the differences between the two, but also understand why. I can think of only one movie or series that stayed fairly true to the books and that was the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but they also averaged 3 hours a piece in length. Not Harry Potter, Twilight, etc. followed the book plots exactly, but you don't seem to be bashing those.
The movie was cast perfectly, and Jennifer Lawrence was fantastic. She looked fit and athletic; which if you paid attention, would be obtained from her (Katniss) waking up early and hunting every day. But that was very manly and mature of you to politely call her fat...jerk off.
This article sounds like a 16 year old boy ranting about how his GF went to see "The Hunger Games" this weekend instead of hanging out with him in the hopes he was going to get to "second base". Whatever your angle is, if you truly feel this way about the movie or just figuring you'll get press from whining, it makes you look juvenile and not worthy to be writing for CBSNews. Not every movie is going to be "Fight Club", but until then go back to your tiny studio apartment and watch Brad Pitt by yourself in the dark.
I will say that you get much more out of the movie if you've already read the book. Perhaps that's a flaw in the production, but obviously not a fatal one.