I pulled a little bit of an Al Mack last night-and the narcolepsy definitely wasn’t because I was bored. I was just so tired and 2 and half hours is a long movie….LONG. As a huge fan of the book, I have been anticipating this movie, but also concerned about all the hype. Let’s put it this way, any movie that gets this much buildup, is usually a disappointment. Well, much to my surprise, The Hunger Games satisfies. The first thing you notice is that Jennifer Lawrence out acts basically everyone except for Stanley Tucci. Woody Harrelson and Elizabeth Banks are both excellent as well, but this movie is all about Katniss. There couldn’t have been a better casting choice. This role for her honestly isn’t very far off from the role that garnered her an Oscar nod for Winter’s Bone. She hails from what is supposed to be the bleakest, most destitute area in the country and her life looks like it sucks. It is immediately established that she is strong and resourceful, having to hunt for food daily just to survive. The imagery in this film is simply stunning. The dialogue could be completely removed and it would still be compelling. We are taken from the most barren landscape where people are living like pioneers to a world that looks like Gladiator-era Rome plus the addition of Steve Jobs. It is technologically advanced and people are quirky as hell. When we meet Stanley Tucci for the first time, it’s clear that both he and Jennifer Lawrence will be the highlight of the movie. The acting overall is so superior to the Twilight kids that it’s honestly not even worth this sentence to compare the two.
We finally learn exactly why the kids have to fight to the death.
A nation called Panem exists where the United States once stood. Every year, to mark the anniversary of a peace treaty that ended a bloody rebellion, each of Panem’s districts has to send one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18, known as tributes, to the Capitol to participate in a brutal kill-or-be-killed event called the Hunger Games. Only one child comes out alive.
It’s so long I got hungry…twice. There are moments of such intensity in the film and then it drags like a walk through nature. Seeing movies with a real audience of fans is far better than those press screenings because you can gauge the real reaction. Instead of hearing silence, or journalists jotting down notes in the good parts.
In Twilight, Bella spends her alone time pining over her love for Edward, In Hunger Games, Katniss productively spends it trying to survive.
It’s a bit of a conundrum to describe this movie, because it’s definitely geared towards the older teenage crowd, but there are moments of such brutality that even someone like me who watched Human Centipede was taken aback. Death by arrow, javelin, genetically engineered wasp, plus knives. And land mines. And fearsome dogs, conjured by the dogs of the totalitarian state.
I found it scary because in this world of blurred reality television what’s real what’s fake and what we will watch, it seems that a gladiator style show isn’t took far off.
