The Hunger Games (2012)

The first warning is that this is a long movie, logging in at almost 2 1/2 hours. Unlike many movies that are this length, I did not finish watching it and feel like there were whole swaths of it that could have been cut. On the contrary, I felt the lead in to the 'Hunger Games' of the title was if anything a bit on the short side. I have read this trilogy, so I knew what was going on, but laying out the dystopian society that is the backdrop to the main action in this movie could have been even a bit more thorough. The second warning is, don't watch it late at night. The second half is a race for survival, and again, I read the book. I knew what would happen before it unfolded on the screen, and yet I found myself completely caught up in the action, and definitely could not have dropped off to sleep afterwards.

The society depicted here is on the one hand very advanced--bullet trains and sleek skyscrapers--and on the other hand very shallow and petty. So we are prone to hate the government right off the bat. It is an extreme classist society--the people in the Capital have all the money and resources, all the food and none of the work. They live off the Districts, who work in a kind of enslaved labor, divided by industry or agriculture. Katniss is a 16 year old girl from District 12, which is a coal mining district, poor and oppressed--think Appalacia, or better yet, her last movie, 'Winter's Bone'. Soul crushing poverty, mixed with a totalitarian regime, and a father who died in a coal mining accident. Much like 'Winter's Bone', the mother is weak, and it is left to the eldest daughter to fend for the family. She is brave, smart, cunning, and she knows how to hunt. The government has a Romanesque tournament every year, where they go to each district and randomly choose a boy and a girl (ages 12-18), is a process called 'The Reaping'. These children are placed in an arena and the whole Capital watches as they kill each other off, one by one, until there is a sole child standing. Katniss volunteers for this barbaric ritual when her sister is chosen, then spends the rest of the movie struggling to stay alive, and grappling with the lose-lose situation that she has plunged herself into. Lots of good material here, and the movie remains more or less faithful to the book as well.