Hunger Games, The : Movie Review


"If no one watches, then they don't have a game," a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins's astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle, and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author has said, by flipping the channels from a reality-TV show to footage of the Iraq war. Most of Collins's critique, then, is compromised by the very existence of this big-screen transfer, itself the most anticipated spectacle of the spring. (The novelist, who both co-wrote the script with director Gary Ross and Billy Ray and executive-produced, is apparently fine with the contradiction.)

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Author : Melissa Anderson