At the very beginning of “The Hunger Games,” the audience is presented with a quotation from a treaty, drafted by the fictional nation of Panem, whose bizarre and cruel ritual is the focus of the film’s story. According to the excerpt, many years ago, twelve districts within the nation set out to rebel against the ruling authority, triggering a long and violent civil war that left the country crippled. As punishment for their treason, the Capital of Panem decreed that these twelve districts would be forced to offer up one girl and one boy from the ages of 12 to 18 annually so that the 24 youths might fight to the death in a televised event, which its creators justify as creating national spirit as well as a reminder of the price of one’s actions.
Adapted from the first book of the bestselling trilogy by Suzanne Collins, “The Hunger Games” traces the lead-up to the 74th iteration of the Games and the Games themselves, focusing on two “tributes” from District 12, an impoverished province whose sole economic tent-pole appears to be coal-mining. The industry seems to have muted both the energy and the color of the District, leaving a swath of gray soot on the screen. The main protagonist, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), volunteers for the Games in order to save her younger sister from being forced to participate, while her male counterpart, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), is chosen by lottery. The two are brought from their dying District out into the Capital to be trained like star athletes and groomed like red-carpet walkers. On the trip over, they encounter their “mentor,” Haymitch (a curmudgeonly and amicably gruff Woody Harrelson), a previous winner of the Games.
The first half of the film, which covers Katniss and Peeta’s preparations, sets a striking visual mood for the picture, creating a lush dystopian background against which to set the protagonists, neither of whom seem quite sure what to make of the upcoming competition, which seems like both the most brutal pageant and the most beautiful execution one might imagine. Special praise is due to the costume designers, who have created one of the oddest and most striking wardrobes in film, which can only be described as a three-way cross between the aesthetics of Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” her father’s Bram Stroker’s “Dracula,” and the wildlife from “Avatar.” Jagged splotches of color contrast wonderfully with the monolithic techno-Classical design of the totalitarian hive in which they bask, creating a spectacle which is both gorgeously absurd and succinctly bleak.
But even while the camera holds on the detailed renderings of the film’s ornate setting, the film pushes forward with a concerted desire to disorient and trouble its viewer, to replicate the sinking gut feeling of the Games’ participants by alternating long steady-cam shots which lose the audience in the crowd with shorter shaky-cam shots that suggest whirling eyes struggling to find their bearings.
When the film finally does make it to the competition itself, it manages to maintain its balance of visceral and aesthetic stimuli. In one of the most gut-wrenching scenes, the participants of the Games rush forward towards caches of weapons and supplies (which Katniss has been wisely told to avoid). Upon reaching the tools, the children proceed to butcher each other in increasingly inelegant snippets of violence. The camera moves from murder to murder in trembling, brief shots as red blood is splattered onto silver boxes. In one particularly unsettling moment, a contestant stands over his victim, hacking at him with a thick curved knife, bringing down stroke after untrained stroke as though he were attempting to cut through a log. For the most part, the violence continues in this way, shown in rapid athletic jaunts, which both startle and excite. That said, the camera spends the majority of the competition following Katniss’ attempts to evade opponents in the thick forest of the arena, setting traps, destroying supplies, and finally, sharing some intense sexual tension with a wounded Peeta in an underground cave.
There are a great number of things for which “The Hunger Games” deserves praise, chief among them being the cast’s almost uniformly strong acting. Lawrence’s Katniss is simultaneously cocky and terrified, endlessly resourceful and hopelessly outmatched by the more sadistic competitors. Hutcherson’s Peeta is strong, but shy and self-effacing, yearning for the girl whose death is integral to his survival. The chemistry between the two is well plotted and effectively employed and, while both can easily drift over from stoic into bland, the script is quick to recover and gives both performers moments in which to reengage their guns, so to speak.
The film’s one major weakness, however, lies in the size of its supporting cast, in many ways a holdover from the novel. At times, due to the pacing of the film and the need to deploy information about the world of the Games, the task of developing other competitors, especially the antagonists, falls by the wayside. Throughout the competition, Katniss is hunted by a coalition of almost comically sadistic tributes from Districts 1 and 2, who are portrayed as Aryan rich-kid bullies, enjoying the slaughter of their lesser fellows with an unrealistic glee. As they move about the forest, joking and threatening Katniss, it’s hard not to note the two-dimensionality of their cruelty. They aren’t the same as the other victimized tributes. They’re just preppy little Jeffery Dahmers. In many ways, it almost felt as though I were watching James Spader trying to kill off Molly Ringwald in an inappropriately gruesome remake of “Pretty in Pink.”
Another feature that may frustrate viewers is the film’s distinct choice to avoid much of the social commentary of the book. At times it does touch on the themes of poverty and inequality which are inherent to the novel, but on the whole, the film seems much more interested in delving into the emotional side of the story and letting the political implications fall by the wayside. In many ways, this works. The film creates moments of raw guttural emotion, leaving out the socially conscious trappings that might cause it to stumble. We cry not for the implications of a world gone so terribly wrong, but for the wounds that that world has so willingly inflicted upon us and before our eyes.
“The Hunger Games” is, in turns, brutal, moving, haunting, and triumphant, a muscular and briskly-paced film: an elegiac paean to the loss of innocence and the acceptance of a gray shade of heroism. As I entered the theater with my younger sister, who had not read the books, she asked me whether Katniss was going to kill anybody. Surely, heroes don’t kill kids—especially when they’re all in the same situation. Three-quarters of the way in, though, as our protagonist launched an arrow into the chest of a charging attacker, I turned to my sister to catch her shocked expression before looking back at the screen, knowing that in a game with no rules, no one is above the slaughter.
