Review of The Hunger Games: the movie

The adaptation of the book The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins has become one of the most eagerly anticipated movies since the first of the Harry Potter films came out. Fans of the book eagerly packed midnight screenings of the movie its opening weekend in order to be the first to see how it turned out. The book was a tightly written thriller that was almost impossible to put down once you started it. Many people reported taking it with them to work and to school to sneak reads. So the question for fans and everyone else is if the story and its energy will translate as well to the screen?

Fortunately, the answer is yes. To start with the casting, the producers of The Hunger Games hit a homerun when they chose Jennifer Lawrence as its heroine Katniss Everdeen. Lawrence first attracted notice for her performance in the 2010 film Winter's Bone. She plays a similar character in The Hunger Games. Fierce and indomitable, Lawrence portrays bravery in a way that very few actresses can pull off. Her character is a warrior and her most prominent feature is the fact that she's unafraid. Most parents should be very pleased to have a role model like this for their young girls in a movie.

Gary Ross, the director of The Hunger Games brought in Suzanne Collins to help collaborate on the script for the movie and it shows in the excellent pacing and truth to the book's themes. The Hunger Games is fun but it's also about things that really matter. Set in a dystopian future, The Hunger Games is really a morality tale and a parable as much as it is a cliffhanger. Both as a book and a movie, The Hunger Games is about what values we most cherish and whether we'll stand up for them.

The Hunger Games takes place in a future America that has been divided into 12 separate districts all ruled over by a single capital city called Panem. Once, 74 years ago, all the separate districts rose together as one in an attempt to remove the wealthy Panem from its place of power. The rebellion was crushed and as punishment every year each district is forced to send two of its adolescent children to compete in a gladiator competition to the death.

Before she is chosen by lottery to compete in the Games, Katniss has already been facing questions of basic survival as a provider for her family. Ross has done an excellent job in conveying the poverty and the misery of the people living in the 12 districts and contrasting it with the decadence and wealth of Panem. In order to keep her family fed Katniss has been forced for years to hunt game with her bow and arrow and there is much of the frontier survivalist to her character.

Some of the best traditions of the American character seem to be embodied in this young girl who uses her hard won sense of morality and decency to navigate a world that is filled with terror and danger. Americans still treasure their myth of the frontier and The Hunger Games takes full advantage of this fact to add both a certain romance to the story and also a certain contemporary relevance.

How do Americans see themselves? Are they now more like the wealthy and cynical citizens of Panem or the scrappy and brave Katniss? The Hunger Games both as a book and as a movie fails to tell you the answer to that question and makes you ask it for yourself. The Hunger Games is about moral choices and the paths that we can take in the course of our lives both as separate individuals and as a country.

Jennifer Lawrence's performance is so striking and new that it might lead reviewers to overlook some of the other excellent performances in The Hunger Games. This would be a mistake as The Hunger Games is filled with a fantastic ensemble cast that helps further separate it from your average action movie.

Donald Sutherland is at his best playing the cruel President Snow of Padem and makes something positively magnetic out of his villainy for the viewer. Stanley Tucci also makes an excellent villain playing Ceaser Flickerman as the crass television presenter of the Games. Woody Harrelson has his best performance in years as the constantly drunk Haymitch Abernathy, a former victor of the Games.

There is no clear target to the satire in The Hunger Games but the movie seems to poke fun at a lot of different subjects at once while maintaining a certain ambivalence. There is obviously something to the comparison of the Games in The Hunger Games with current contemporary reality television. The Hunger Games never hits you over the head with any of its messages, however, and the viewer is left to decide for herself.

The Hunger Games is finally the teen movie that teens really deserve; but its becoming popular with an audience of all ages. It never panders and it never simplifies its message. The Hunger Games is a fun movie, but it's also one that manages to be more than just that. The cinematography provided by veteran Clint Eastwood collaborator Tom Stern is beautiful and is the viewer's first clue to the deeper mythic significance of The Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games is a movie with both heart and meaning in it throughout. You should go to see The Hunger Games if you want to be entertained and also if you want to see a movie that reaches at something more than just entertainment. There's nothing cynical about The Hunger Games, it's a real film with real questions that you'll eventually want to have answered.