No appetite for The Hunger Games

Feature for Mannion Family Movie Night is The Hunger Games. I'm wary. Plot has always sounded like an episode of Star Trek to me. "The crew of the Enterprise visit a famine-ridden planet where the children are forced to hunt each other in a contest thst decides whose family will starve to death. While Kirk tries to decide which way he will violate the prime directive this week, Chekhov is drawn to one of the contestants, a bow and arrow wielding blonde who swears she was not the model for the heroine of a Pixar movie released to general disappointment one summer back on 21st Century Earth."

I'm going to spend the whole movie waiting for Kirk and Spock to beam in.

Fans of the books and the movie in the house---that is all the other Mannions in the house---promise me it's much better than I'm making it sound to myself, and anyway it's more like an episode of ST:TNG.

Actually, it's really the case that I'm just not a fan of dystopian science fiction.  It goes back to having had Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 shoved at me during the same year in high school.  I think we had to read We in the same class but that might have been the next year for my Russian novel class for which we also had to read Darkness at Noon and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (By the time we got to The Brothers Karamazov, I was ready to greet Dostoevsky as the Russian P.G.Wodehouse. On my own time, I was reading William Faulkner for the laughs.). Thrown in along the way were Animal Farm and 1984, the Ur-sci-fi adventure, The Odyssey, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, To Build a Fire, The Pearl, Night Flight, and the grimmest of the lot, Jane Eyre, whose final “Dear Reader, I married him” struck me as the last line of a suicide note.  Midway through my senior year I was convinced my English teachers were all trying to tell me something, which was Life stinks, then you die in utter despair.

Pizza's here. Time to go watch. I hope Worf trains Katniss well. But it better not turn out that the whole thing takes place inside the Holodeck.

Updated from District 12, Saturday morning: Ok, I was a bit misinformed about some details of the plot.  Still, it was pretty darn dystopic.  On the other hand, it was well done and once the chase got going, very exciting.  Woody Harrelson is fun. Jennifer Lawrence is learning how to do a lot with her deadpan pout.  And I stopped waiting for Kirk and Spock to arrive to save the day about half way through.

Comments

[Ken Houghton]

"and anyway it's more like an episode of ST:TNG."

And they're putting that forward as a Good thing?

So everyone talks a lot, nothing ever happens, and the most interesting character isn't the Shakespearean actor but rather the guy even James Lapine cast as The Boring One?

[NickT]

I believe the quote from Jane Eyre, chapter 38, is "Reader, I married him."

[sfmike]

Can we have a little sexist ignorance with that sandwich? The movie isn't very good, though it's beautifully cast, but the books are more interesting than any of the boy superhero series you've been pondering lately. The premise isn't particularly interesting until you catch something on TV (say, Fox News or any reality show) that is disturbingly close to what this dystopian girls' antiwar survival series is positing as The New Reality. I'd put the books up there with "The Handmaiden's Tale" as Cassandra-like visionary fiction that's uncomfortably close.

[Chris the cop]

In an effort to keep up with my older daughter and to see what the fuss was about, I read 'Hunger Games' and took her--she'd read all 3--to the movie. I found the book better than I expected and liked the present-tense writing style Collins used. The violence and Katniss's constant anxiety I thought pretty intense for a pre-teen/young teen's book, and I thought the (movie) violence might be too graphic for a 12-year old. But I thought the movie was very good and conveyed very well the lead's terror.

I didn't see any parallels with Star Trek or ST: TNG at all. And Stanley Tucci steals the show.

[Katherine]

i am intrigued by your high school reading list / although i had an excellent public school education in the 40's (grad 1951), loved and respected my teachers, the only book i can recall being assigned was Silas Marner ! maybe something else will come back to me / there was, oc, Forever Amber / smille / on my own i read everything the public library had to offer

[Nennius01]

I saw the movie first and enjoyed it. I then read the book and was surprised by how intense it was. Very good, but intense. I could write here something longer, or I could just link to my own review --> http://davidoengelstad.blogspot.com/2012/09/hunger-games-movie-and-book-review.html

[Lorettadillon]

I turned it off after an hour. I just lost interest. I didn't care about any characters, the movie did not explain (at least not soon enough) why the society was divided thus; presumably the book is much better. I think the movie failed to make me curious or invested. And, generally, I am pretty easy to amuse. I found the whole thing just weird and pointless.

[Lorettadillon]

After a little more thought I know why I turned this off (having not read the book, which probably represents the vast majority of the movie audience) - it was right after they mention that it was the 75th annual Hunger Games, and I thought, WHAT? You mean this miserable farce has been going on that long? The population of the Districts, having once had enough spirit to rebel, is now subjecting themselves to poverty, squalor and serving up their kids every year to a slaughter? While the other half of their world lives in modern affluence? Surely you jest. I couldn't possibly care less if you think I can even accept that premise in the first place.

[Mike]

Yeah, in a world that has seen the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, 45,000 deaths a year due to lack of health insurance, rising income inequality for nearly 40 years amidst falling living standards, 800 years of Roman-era gladiatorial games and the Brazilian favelas, something like the Hunger Games sure does seem implausible.