Another Hollywood blockbuster series based on best-selling teenage books? Yes, but here’s why The Hunger Games will leave the likes of Twilight in the shade
WHEN YOU’RE surrounded by trailers, posters and magazine covers celebrating the impending release of The Hunger Games, it can be hard to see what all the fuss is about. To the uninitiated, the film looks like just another teen-fiction-bestseller-turned-blockbuster-movie. And haven’t we already had two of those in the last few months? And weren’t they both just for die-hard fans?
But The Hunger Games, based on the first book in the hugely popular trilogy by American author Suzanne Collins, promises to be a lot more interesting than the insipid Twilight or the pedestrian Harry Potter. And here’s why.
The dystopian setting
Yes, fictional dystopias are everywhere these days. But Collins’s vision of the future is a particularly compelling one. In the world of The Hunger Games, society has collapsed for unspecified reasons, and a new totalitarian state called Panem has risen from “the ashes of a place once called North America”.
Panem is divided into 12 Districts, each devoted to a different industry, from mining to textiles to agriculture.
Ruling over all the districts is the Capitol, whose decadent residents live in luxury while the District dwellers live in grim poverty.
As punishment for an uprising 75 years ago, every year each District must send two teenagers, a boy and a girl, to compete in the Hunger Games, a huge televised event in which the young competitors, known as tributes, must fight to the death.
The film’s director Gary Ross has said that when it came to creating Panem’s look, he was inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs (for the Districts) and the brutalist Nazi architecture of Albert Speer (for the Capitol).
The games are terrifying
The idea of teens forced to fight to the death has been done before, notably in the Japanese cult classic Battle Royale. And the idea of a television game show with terrifyingly high stakes isn’t new either – Stephen King wrote about competitors being killed for the entertainment of the masses nearly 30 years ago in The Running Man.
But the Hunger Games still feel fresh. That’s partly because of the arena where the games take place, a confusing complex that can contain everything from lakes to forests to meadows, full of deadly traps and genetically mutated animals. It’s also because of the chilling focus on the tributes’ celebrity status – each competitor is assigned a stylist during the pre-games training period to make sure they look good on camera and appeal to television viewers and potential sponsors. It feels worryingly convincing.
The characters are compelling
At the heart of the books and film is Katniss Everdeen, a girl from District 12 who volunteers to compete in the games in the place of her sister Prim, and ends up competing with her old schoolmate Peeta. Brave and determined yet vulnerable and self-aware, Katniss is a charismatic heroine, who becomes a symbol of the growing anti-Capitol resistance as the story goes on, and her relationship with the other characters is satisfyingly complex.
Panem’s dictator President Snow is memorably creepy, Katniss’s stylist Cinna shows that style can be subversive, and her mentor Haymitch, a former games winner turned alcoholic loner, shows that even if you survive the games, you may not live happily ever after.
The stakes are high
You know those books and films where you’re never really worried about the fates of the characters because you know no one you care about will die? This is not one of them. Yes, because it’s a trilogy you know Katniss will survive, at least into the third book and film. But all bets are off for her friends and family.
The cast and crew are talented
Yes, it’s an ultra-violent story set in a dystopic future – so far, so Terminator Salvation. But The Hunger Games is also directed by Gary Ross, whose CV as writer and director includes thoughtful Hollywood fare such as Big, Pleasantville and Seabiscuit rather than cheesy blockbusters.
As for the leading role, instead of Twilight’s sulky Kristen Stewart or Potter’s sweet but hardly magnetic Daniel Radcliffe, The Hunger Games has Jennifer Lawrence, who at 21 has already been nominated for an Oscar for her performance in the independent film Winter’s Bone.
She’s not the only acting heavyweight on board – Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Toby Jones and Stanley Tucci all have leading roles.
Oh, and Lenny Kravitz is in it too, but according to reports he’s not half bad.
