The Hunger Games MarketBOB Movie Review

8/2/2019 The Hunger Games MarketBOB Movie Review

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The Hunger Games

March 24, 2012

A three-finger salute to The Hunger Games for the first socially-significant box office hit of 2012and proof why you don’t carry a bag of apples ina minefield.

One Word Movie Review: soawesome

“So awesome” was the comment fromthe young girl beside me, as in “I’m

not going to lie, that was so awesome”

to give the full quotation from her lips

to my pen. I can’t truly disagree with

her, given she is the target audience

and totally in sync with the books and

the story and the stars and the whole

phenomenon that has been building for

months in social networks and the media.

But is The Hunger Games a good movie as well

as a marketing ticket-selling machine? I’ll get into

that question more fully in my SGQ analysis later

on, but for MarketBOB’s analysis of movie mood,

this is a great movie because it makes you think and feel about social issues streaming all around

us. It reaches out to millions of young people in a

way no politician could ever hope to do. The fact

that this social sci-fi fantasy speaks directly to a

new generation about issues such as inequality,




oppression, independence and class warfare in a

gigantic box office way, it deserves to be labeled

as a great movie.

The Hunger Games is the first of four movies based on the sci-fi trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

Yes, Hollywood likes to stretch books into two-

parters because it adds about a billion dollars to

ticket grosses when they become blockbusters.

This is one series that is destined for that rare

elevation of book-to-movie success, like Harry

Potter and Twilight . Based on the spectacular opening weekend sales, The Hunger Games will

fill the void left from these previous mega-series

final chapters.

It is impossible to tell if The Hunger Games will

become the Easy Rider of a new generation, where

today’s youth start to question the authority of

things around them; of why they are forced to bindtheir future into decades of servitude to pay back

student loans which fund an inflated education

system; or forced into a future of lower class

service jobs as the middle class shrinks and the 1%

amuse themselves observing the rest of us compete

in reality Hunger Games for less opportunities and

higher taxes than any generation. Will these kidsaccept their debtor’s inheritance in order to support

“The Capital” in a lifestyle of charmed plenty

surrounded by a desert of starving masses?




Or perhaps this is just a petite amusement; light

entertainment churned out by Hollywood to

distract the very audience that should care more

about the world around them but is content to textand borrow today for a future we cannot afford.

It was a somber crowd leaving the theater after this

movie, even though they were young. The Hunger

Games is a depressing movie, with an ending that

confirms the theme of courage and survival but

does not deliver anything close to triumph. It is

popular because it strikes a chord, a dissonantchord for troubled times.

The Story

The initial text explains the setting of The Hunger

Game, a world recovering from civil war by forcing

the rebel territories to sacrifice one male and one

female each year to compete against each other in amatch to the death. Only one will survive, and the

odds are terrible.

This year, the 74th year of the games, finds our

heroine Katniss Everdeen (played with restrained

dignity by Jennifer Lawrence) becoming the first

volunteer for the deadly games after her younger

sister is picked from the glass bowl to be thesacrificial tribute for District 12. Katniss has been

the family hunter, as food is scarce. She is good with

a bow and at home in the wild, along with her

boyfriend Gale (who is a dreamer, posing “what if”




questions all the time) instead of dealing with the

dismal reality of living in a mining district just one

notch up from a slave labor camp.

After much angst about separating from family andfriends, and battling with her co-tribute partner Peeta

(a baker’s son who has one strong survival skill from

hefting 100 pound bags of flour). Soon, they are in

the Hunger Games, battling to survive and perhaps

falling in love to get sponsors who parachute

supplies into the game at moments of great

desperation.

The ending finds our heroine alive but facing an

uncertain future in three more movies, battling the

evil central Capital, personified by white-haired

Donald Sutherland as President Snow. It is Snow

who frames the games as an opiate of hope and fear

for the rebel districts, more effective than just taking

24 people and executing them every year. TheHunger Games is a way to keep underdogs at bay,

and we all know that will not end well for the top

dogs eventually (by #4 in this series). However, we

have much suffering and victories to go, like our

friendly Star Wars rebels against the evil Empire. Is

Donald (Darth) Sutherland secretly the father of

Katniss?

The Genre

The “sci-fi fantasy social message sequel franchise

formula” genre hasn’t really seen much box office




success since The Matrix series, where we were

all sleeping fuel for the machines. We’ve been fed

a superhero, vampire and doomsday diet for years

now in the sci-fi genre. The 60s and 70s were thefat years for social sci-fi both in books and on the

screen as utopian societies of every form and shape

were settings for our amusement, from Planet of

the Apes, Soylent Green and Logan’s Run to

name but a few.

These re-imagined societies play the role of

morality tales for us to measure ourselves, as if wecould end up in these unhappy places if we keep

going down our current path.

Perhaps this marks the end of our doomsday 2012

fantasy of worlds about to end and the start of our

“fighting back” phase of visualizing a better world

for underdogs everywhere, once we kill 23 other

kids in these games and move on to the real battleagainst misguided, authoritarian governments.

The Overall Quality

The Hunger Games is a bleak, slow-moving

understated film that shouldn’t work as well as itdoes. There are moments of tedium, some absurd

plot points and the worst hairdos, beards and

costumes since The Fifth Element . I mean, it is

hard to watch an actor’s face when they’ve got a




pile of fuzzy blue hair on top or a beard that looks

more like Mike Tyson’s tattoo than facial hair.

All that aside, the forest battle scenes are quietly

menacing and the final mano-a-girlo battle scene iswell done. There is the nice twist of rule changes

within the game itself, very much like today’s

reality shows, trying to raise the stakes more for

the audience’s enjoyment than the competitor’s

sense of fair play.

What carries this movie is the acting from the leadcharacters, especially Jennifer Lawrence who plays

Katniss with a vulnerability battling beneath her

need to survive. Woody Harrelson plays Haymitch

Abernathy (yes, the names are sci-fi riffs), a

survivor from past games and advisor to District

12. He arcs from drunk to power broker to

political advisor with confidence and, as we all

know Woody can act a bit crazy at times, he is oneof the sanest characters in this movie.

The music is supervised by the great T. Bone

Burnett and is a moody cross between Enya and a

military band, but it works. It is sparse and

soulful, like this world; hungry for freedom and

independence. These kids are through paying for

the sins of a long-past war. Oh my, there is a

revolution in the sequel winds.

And, for those of you who loved the book, let me

quote a delightful child in front of me who, when




asked if it was like the book replied, “yeah, but

in the book she got two more parachutes!” I

expect this movie fan will grow up to be an

accountant.

Movie/Market Analysis

The Movie Mood for audiences is Negative. The Hunger

Games played to a quiet crowd. There were no cheers,

fists pumped in the air or sighs of lust like during Twilight

whenever some guy took his shirt off. This movie created

a somber mood of hope and fear, courage and sacrifice.The odds seem horrible for our heroine but terrific for

Lions Gate Studios and the box office hunger for more.

MarketBOB's Movie Review Sentiment Indicators, the

GQS (Genre, Quality, Story) rate The Hunger Games an

emotional BULL. This is a successful franchise in the

making, using Hollywood’s movie machine while

satirizing it at the same time. It is not a leap to see theHunger Games show as the Oscars, the battle for

sponsors as ruthless as ever and creating fake love stories

to build interest and raise the stakes, all for the

audience’s delight. At least, Stanley Tucci as the host of

the 74th Hunger Games wasn’t as grotesque as Billy

Crystal hosting the 84th Academy Awards.

It has been a lean, barren year so far at the movies, with

little interesting to review from MarketBOB’s movie

mood point of view. I review movies that have box




office success and some emotional connections between

the audience and the world around us. We are what we

watch and I believe we know more about ourselves when

we sit in the dark and share a story together. Weinterpret the heroes we see as part of ourselves, to admire

and emulate. The Hunger Games is the first movie this

year to warrant a MarketBOB review. Let’s hope there

are more out there.

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The Hunger Games MarketBOB Movie Review