Hunger Games Review/Critique
The movie The Hunger Games was released in 2012 and produced by Nina Jacobson and Jon Kilik.
In the beginning Katniss lives in District 12. District 12 is extremely poor and it is hard to survive. Katniss has to fend for her mom, sister, and her self. Her friend Gale also struggles to help his family but finds a way. To make money they hunt animals and sell them on the black market. They also put their names in a drawing to see who gets into the hunger games. The more entries one has the more rations they receive.
The movie starts out slow. It takes about thirty minutes for the movie to finally pick up pace. The beginning is crucial to understand what the movie is about and to see how they live. But they should have made it in a more interesting way. Like maybe showing them hunting more or adding in something exciting that happens every week. Other than starting slow the beginning is well put together.
After they are done with the opening parts of the movie it starts to get much more interesting. During the drawing they have the whole town gather around and see who has to enter the games. While there everyone has a chance of getting drawn. While everyone waits in suspense they have speeches and announce past winners. (District 12 has none.) When it is time to draw everyone gets silent. They draw the male first. Peeta Mellark. He is a young boy. He is strong, sweet, and has blonde hair. He comes from wealth so everyone is surprised he is picked. Then the female is picked. Prim Everdeen. She is Katniss’ little sister and only had one slip in the hat. Katniss immediately volunteers for her.
In this part of the movie the creators and actors do a great job at showing the atmosphere of the place. Everyone is gloomy and sad. Everyone is worried about getting drawn. When they draw the first people there is a sigh of relief from the crowd. Without being bale to be picked a change of feeling sweeps over the crowd. They are no longer worried for being picked themselves but they feel sorry for the 2 people that were picked for the games. By making the audience be able to feel this means they did a very good job of showing emotion with their acting and scripting.
The next part of the movie is about them traveling to the Capital to prepare for the games. They eat lavish, expensive, five course meals 3 times a day. They have warm beds with soft pillows and thick blankets. They give them facial cures, manicures, pedicures, and any other type of cures available. To get to the capital Katniss and Peeta aboard a train that has anything they could ever need. They meet their mentors and team leaders. The mentors for each team are a male victor and female victor form the most recent year.
Whoever staged the train and the village did a wonderful job of contrasting how to poor and the rich live. The lives they have are so much different form each other there is no way that either of them could understand each others way of living. By showing how different they live it gives you a look into how they will try and rebel against the capital. The people of the capital have no respect for the tributes. Because they did such a great job of showing the differences of their lifestyles the viewer can truly feel how Katniss is feeling during her journey.
After they arrive to the Capital the tributes are put through a number of challenges in order to rank the competitors. Many of the exercises include throwing knives, shooting arrows, camouflage, and basic survival skills. The object of participating in these events is to show yourself off to the sponsors. The sponsors will spend their money to send the tributes food, supplies, and medicine. During one of the most important challenges where they have to prove themselves to the game makers. They will then score them based on what task they perform. The higher the number the better the score.
The movie does an alright job of making the challenge not totally far fetched. It is going to be a little unreal because the movie is fiction but Katniss scoring an eleven because she shot an arrow through the apple in the pigs mouth is a little much. She was such an underdog and came from nothing. Then she became the highest ranked contestant in the games. That isn’t the most convincing thing to me. Other than that the staging of the challenges is spot on. All of the game makers not paying attention until she says her name, and the arena type building they were in perfectly shows what the book was describing.
For the final part of the first movie it is about the actual games. When Katniss first leaves the platform she is tempted to run to the cornucopia but chooses to run to a backpack around the outside. She survives pretty easily for the first two days until their is a fire that pushes her back toward the middle of the arena. She is almost captured by the alliance until she pushes a bee hive down from the top of a tree. After that Peeta’s group injures him and leaves him to die until Katniss finds him and tries to help him survive. They then announce that there will be a new cornucopia with something that everyone will need. This is an attempt to lure all the contestants back to the front. She barely gets the medicine for Peeta’s leg and manages to get away. Then when his leg is almost healed they go back to fight the last person from District 1. He is injured all ready from the “Muts”. Once they finally kill him it is just Katniss and Peeta left. Instead of one of them killing each other Katniss hands Peeta a handful of poisonous berries. They vouch to eat them at the same time so that there will be no winner. Instead they call it off and declare both of them the winners.
This is the perfect ending to the story. They both didn’t want to be the capitals slaves and by threatening to both kill themselves it proves perfectly into how they didn’t want to be owned. If they just fought to the end then they would be giving in to the capital’s games. They did a great job of keeping it interesting and also having a logical ending that had a purpose.
8.5/10
