A winner is me! It’s the post novel writing month and I’m still riding on those loose vapours of having conquered the task. Course, for a novel titled Mary Creek’s Blood there’s a conspicuous lack of the sanguine but what can you do?

This joyous time means, of course, we return to our regular posting schedule. And since it is the season to be festive and celebratory, I’m going to begin it with a delightful review! Oh, how wonderful is holiday criticism.

Let’s move on to the typical prefacing. I want to first establish that just because one finds fault or flaws in a work does not make it bad or worthless. Look back across our long history of culture and you’ll find flaws in just about any great work. The Statue of David, after all, has enormous hands and a head. Apollo Belvedere has the exact opposite issues. Nothing crafted by human hands has ever been perfect and even my favourite art has nits which can use some picking. Criticism does not equate to quality or a lack there of. Beneath its surface, criticism is simply an engagement with a piece and the extended conversation between crafter and audience that has always been intricate since the moment some old man gathered his cave-children around a fire to tell them of the first buffalo to roam the plains.

And my verdict is!

Now with that said, The Hunger Games is a bad movie.

Alright, this isn’t the most topical of discussions but if anyone thought I was going to be rushing out to the theatre to see the opening feature of the Hunger Games Trilogy then, well, they don’t know me at all. I had full intentions of not seeing/reading/experiencing this teen drama since I had already read Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. And if you’re over the age of eighteen, I think it’s pretty safe to say that you’d consider the Japanese version not only the predecessor but the superior telling of the story.

All that said, I didn’t even like Battle Royale. I felt it suffered the Lord of the Flies syndrome but this isn’t a Battle Royale review so that is neither here nor there. Obviously, I’m going to only examine the film and the unfairly compare it to the much more developed medium of Battle Royale‘s book form. Will anyone be surprised when the film ultimately come across as more shallow? I hope not!

First, the customary preamble:

The Hunger Games follows spunky, go get ’em Jennifer Lawrence as the eponymous Catnis (Catniss? Katnis? Katniss?) of District 12. The movie makes immediately clear the crushing poverty which Catnip lives with her younger sister and ambiguously employed mother in old timey Midwestern Quaker America. She leads an exciting life of hunting boar from the King’s forest and eating the local cake shop owner’s burnt and soggy bread while courting a budding romance with young Throbheart McHandsome. This delightfully dirty pastoral life could not last and her whole world comes crashing down in traditional fashion with the arrival of a spaceship delivering the Queen of the Oompa Loompas.

Here, the quaintly townsfolk are gathered up to perform Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, replete with coal miners, surprising in the frankness of its name: The Reaping. Course, the twist here is that instead of males over sixteen being candidates, we’ve decided to only make children between the ages of twelve and eighteen eligible. This is for reasons obviously beyond trying to appease the target market demographic, I am certain. There is, of course, some propaganda video with some bullshit reason explaining the historical context for this system which is apparently in place for seventy-five years, but so unbelievable is that explanation that I’ve already forgotten it.

Of course, Catnip’s sister gets selected as one of the “Tributes” to the Capitol (because subtlety is a lost art in the future) and Catnip boldly steps forward to volunteer in her place.

This was when I did a “bwuh?” moment. Anyway, everyone gasps, Catnip walks forward, Strawberry Shortcake draws the male representative and our two heroes board a hover train to be whisked away from their shitty lives of digging in mud to reach the very short terminus of their lives. This is where the story really deviates from Battle Royale, however. And it’s not just because they meet Woody Harrelson aboard the train.

As the audience quickly discovers, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was apparently the only classic work to survive whatever terrible war tore America apart in this speculative future and everyone is dressed as garishly as possible while they stroll through a city plucked from the doodlings of Steve Jobs. Here, Catnip learns that the games are essentially a gussied up Miss America competition but instead of a swimsuit competition to round off the finales, contestants are instead expected to either starve off their competition (that shouldn’t be hard in a Miss America contest) or bludgeon them to death with whatever item is nearby.

And to think people draw parallels between modern America and the Roman Empire.

The workings of the games, it seems, are based around impressing the crowd in the Capitol and acquiring sponsors to send you little robotic crates like kill streak goodie crates in Call of Duty. We’re then treated to an extended portion where Lenny Kravits tries his best Chris Tucker from the Fifth Element impression while dressing Catnip in the most garish costumes that a fevered teen author can imagine. Catnip scopes out the competition during their four days of officiated training and interviews are held with each contestant before a crowd all to eager to gasp and laugh as though the tele-prompters were all equipped with semi-automatics.

We’re well past the hour before the actual games begin and here we see the second largest departure from Battle Royale. Around half the contestants are killed in the first four minutes of the games and Catnip spends most of the time climbing trees and hanging out with bees than partaking in any actual “game.” Of course, she gets help from some spunky little girl meant to warm the cuckolds of our hearts before she has the grace to be killed by someone else other than Catnip (seriously, what was your plan in befriending the little girl?) which justifies the only real kill Catnip performs in the entire game. She then spends most of her time caring for Peter, the male representative of her Mudville commune while hiding in caves and waiting for the game makers to get bored and release mutant dogs to conveniently eat anyone who happens to be left.

(The Hunger Games is property of Lionsgate and Suzanne Collins and whoever else)

There’s a customary “battle” of sorts with the one contestant who was dressed as a roman soldier during the opening ceremonies and is blonde haired and blue-eyed so we can only assume he’s meant to be a Nazi stand-in. But even this villain is pretty unconvincing as he taunts Catnip while holding Peter at knife point with such blood-chilling lines like “Kill me. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter.”

He falls off their post-postmodernist pez dispenser and is eaten by dogs before Catnip may or may not have delivered a mercy shot from her iconic bow before the “star-crossed lovers” who may, or may not, be actually in love or just hamming it up before the camera in order to gain more sponsorship, realize that some pointless ploy by the game makers to allow two winners for the games is really a ruse (elegantly revealed by the game makers themselves making a broadband announcement because they feel having 12-18 year olds enact a bloodsport isn’t evil enough). Catnip threatens to do a joint suicide with Peter which forces them to deliver truly on their earlier promise to let the pair live and crown them victors.

Cue the celebration montage and Catnip and her on-again, off-again heartthrob returning home amidst smiling faces and fluttering confetti as though the fact that she killed two children is something worthy of celebration.

Hit the credits, prep secondary camera crews and get filming started on the sequel because we can rake in tons of cash from the teeny-boppers with this nonsense.

Seriously, there’s so much to discuss why The Hunger Games is the poor Midwestern coal miner’s version of Battle Royale. But for me, the lasting issue is I have no idea why this thing exists as a piece of art. It’s purpose is lost on me.

There appears to be three key elements that are more jarringly thrown together than the Halloween costumes of the Capitol citizens and their pristine, clean white buildings.  We have the opening set-up of a post-war dystopian America organized into a tyrannical and yet oddly absent totalitarian government. As though tutu Nazis weren’t intimidating to begin with, the fences erected around District 12 are unmanned and Catnip slips between them rather effortlessly to hunt amongst the plentiful forests with just a half-hearted scolding from Chiseled Dreamman that this is dangerous/bad/mildly unacceptable. There is a sense that the government is suppose to be all domineering, complete with cheap Star Wars Stormtrooper knockoffs that show up to perform the Reaping on the children (which sounds worse than it actually is). Furthermore, the fact that you can volunteer for the games gives a somewhat mild alternative to the cold-hearted ripping of twelve year old children to throw mercilessly into a gladiatorial arena.

I mean, they make mention that one district trains up their children for the games and has them volunteer every year. Why every district doesn’t do this is beyond me. You would think that a responsible community with apparently no motivation to organize an uprising (since they’re not actually oppressed-see the complacent absence of the froo froo Capitol “army” earlier) would at the very least teach some people what skills they can to give their children a fighting chance in the games. I suppose this sort of kindheartedness was lost on the future Quakers because they were too busy making sure their mud was still properly muddy.

Contrast this with Battle Royale. Here, the government chooses a single graduating class amongst all the high schools in the country seemingly at random. Everyone knows this will happen but prays that the odds are in the favour (and generally speaking they are given that only one class is taken and there are a lot of schools in Japan). Here, the government literally kidnaps the students, going so far as to execute teachers who try to interfere with the process. They are then whisked away to some random location in the country which changes every year. The people of said area are forcibly evacuated for the duration of the games without so much a “Sorry Ma’am.” There is a heavy implication that the whole point of the games in Battle Royale is to instill fear and obedience in the populace. The twist, however, is that the government is simply corrupt (shocking!) and they only maintain this barbaric murder spree because it’s become somewhat of a bureaucratic gambling event.

My first instinct given the opening act of The Hunger Games was that we would get this very same “totalitarian governments are evil” shtick. However, when Catnip and Peter are whisked away to the city, there is no sense that we’re really suppose to feel these games are horrific. The contestants are treated like celebrities and past winners languish in comfort and luxury. Furthermore, everyone seems excited and the games is treated more like American Idol than anything else.

Thus, I began to wonder if this was ultimately a criticism of American media and its exploitation of the people it sucks in. An immediate comparison would be the Toddlers and Tiaras show and the whole controversy surrounding child pageants.

But, no, the movie never really explains that the system is bad. In fact, it celebrates the ingenuity of Catnip for manipulating it in her favour. Sure, District 11 gets angry and tries to riot when their little girl gets speared but outside of that, everyone seems pretty damn happy with the conclusion of the 74th Hunger Games. There isn’t any sense that the audience themselves are part of the problem. Outside of the stupid costumes of the Capitol citizens, they’re mostly portrayed as blank individuals there to cheer blindly on for our protagonist as we, the viewer, cheers her on simply because she is the heroine and that is what you do.

Finally, we have the games themselves. Battle Royale is almost entirely composed of its combat. It goes into great detail about each student, often right before they are horribly killed in ever escalating orgasmic feats of violence and murder. The Hunger Games, on the other hand, is incredibly shy about its actual games. It’s like the author didn’t actually want to write about the bloodsport with almost all the people either dying away from Catnip and off screen or to rather mild methods (single shots from thrown spears, arrows or hilarious and not-graphic ‘neck snaps’). There isn’t any real exploration of how this absurdly barbaric event would really impact the people involved either. The “villainous” contestants essentially form a jock squad of bullies going around pantsing the nerds and giving them swirlies. Catnip befriends the outcasts and everyone seems quite content to ignore the fact that they are all stuck there until everybody but one is killed! Seriously. You would think the district which supposedly trains its children the hardest for these games would have drilled into them “Trust no one!” There is no benefit in grouping up with people and then blithely falling asleep at their side. Had Peter been so inclined, he could have slit the throats of about five of the contestants, bringing the movie to its conclusion a good half hour early.

So, I have no idea why this book exists. It’s like three half baked ideas which no one really wanted to explore. The horrors of dystopian totalitarian military states? Nope, that’s never touched. The exploitative and inhuman way media treats and views both its stars and audience? Nope, the media is wonderful and really we just celebrate those that succeed within it! The senseless and gross loss of value in the death of an individual especially for something as banal and pointless as a sport? Nope, we view the survivors as heroes and the losers are very quickly forgotten for adoration and accolades. There is no reason for Catnip, after surviving the games, to blithely answer the master of ceremonies about how she found love and everything is wonderful. She should have condemned Flickman, the audience and even the government for how disposable they were. Why are people all applause and grins when Rue died and no one cares? Catnip went so far as to build a rather extravagant pyre for the girl and then never thinks of her again.

There is no reason to create this cold-hearted set-up if you’re not even going to use it. There’s a whole lot of nothing going on in this movie. There’s no commentary on the value or disposability of life. It’s a watered down, friendly version of Battle Royale which by its nature is neither of those. The Hunger Games is, ultimately, forgettable. At its best, it’s mild entertainment meant to distract and appease for its brief flutter across the eyes of its readers. But there’s no punch to it. There’s no depth. It’s only so much fluffy pink dress and horrible CGI flames that’s all too quickly forgotten after the next spectacle comes rolling through.