By Scott Mendelson HollywoodNews.com: The Hunger Games, as it exists as a film, is caught between two worlds. One on hand, it wants to be a dramatic thriller about a totalitarian regime that picks children at random and forces them to fight each other to the death for the entertainment of the wealthy masses. On the other hand, it wants to be a series that appeals to mass audiences in order to rack up massive box office grosses and become ‘the next big franchise’. Note – this is not a conventional review and there will be far more spoilers than usual. So warned… As a direct result of this conundrum, the picture not only fails as a social/political commentary but becomes an ugly celebration of the very narrative that it should be condemning. By refusing to look directly at its own story and by instead fashioning a convenient morality out of its murderous sporting event, it lets the audience off the hook and even encourages them to enjoy the blood-sport as ‘entertainment’. The film may appear to be mocking reality show conventions and the tendency to emphasize simplistic narratives to alleviate discomfort, but by virtue of what it omits and what it emphasizes, The Hunger Games is a prime example of what it claims to criticize. The film is so afraid to confront the horror of its premise that, in its need to create a mass-audience PG-13 franchise, it makes the cheering audience culpable and every bit as guilty as those who would watch such a thing in real life. First and foremost, the film fails by refusing to develop or examine nearly all of the 24 Hunger Games contestants. The large number of competitors/victims is actually solved by having eleven of them get slaughtered within the first five minutes of the competition (eight hours in actual time). So the majority of the onscreen competition comes down to thirteen contestants. Other than the lead character (Katniss Everdeen played by Jennifer Lawrence) and her would-be partner/love interest (Peeta Mellark played by Josh Hutcherson), not a single contestant is given any depth. For the majority of the film, we are watching unnamed contestants kill other nearly-faceless contestants. When the cast is whittled down, we are left with the pretty blonde, the cute redhead, the brunette, the tall black guy, the young black girl, the [...]
