Why I Saw This Movie:
My friends
invited me out to the cinema to see Catching
Fire, so I watched this movie the night before as homework.
The Review
I know Hollywood likes to
retread everything these days, but there are certain shockers that can only be
played once. Battle Royale really shocked me, but I had limited
patience for a remake of Battle Royale.
Also, Battle Royale was able to set-up its
premise within the first 10 minutes.
This movie took over an hour just for the set-up. My patience was loooong gone.
Both movies
are psychological experiments conducted through fiction—given this scenario,
how would people actually react? I’m not
sure I found the emotional reactions in The
Hunger Games entirely realistic.
2 out of 10 stars (If
this had been my first exposure to the premise, I probably would have rated it
higher.)
Things I Would Talk
About if I Wasn’t Limiting Myself to 100 Words
* Expanding on the above points—which scenes in particular
struck me as unrealistic emotions.
* More compare and contrast with Battle Royale.
*As to the above point—specifically how Battle Royale attempts to comment on human nature by showing
ordinary teenagers driven to do horrible things because of the desperateness of
the situation, whereas The Hunger Games
uses the same premises to divide its characters into likeable protagonists and
unlikeable antagonists and simply produces another mindless action film.
* Apologizing for
not having read the books despite a number of you having recommended the books
to me, and an acknowledgement that I’m sure the books probably are much better
than the movie.
Links
* Roger Ebert’s Review of the film. (A
different opinion than mine, but I still like his analysis.)
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - Necessary Illusions 1989 Full
2 comments:
I'd read the book first (just to see for myself what the kids were so into), so my only question was, could the movie do alright by the source (which I thought was pretty good)? I liked the movie well enough. It didn't tarnish what I'd read, which I thought was quite an accomplishment. But, yeah, slow as hell.
I've had a number of adult friends highly recommend the book to me. It's just one of those things I never got around to. I'm sure if I had read the book I would have appreciated the movie a lot more. But at the moment, all I can judge is the movie. And I was underwhelmed
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