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Created Apr 11, 2012 11:38PM PST • Edited May 01, 2023 03:04PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   An important but hardly perfect movie, The Hunger Games is however great enough to justify the fuss. The monster box office generated by this first installment of Suzanne Collins’ bestselling trilogy of YA novels is helping The Hunger Games and heroine Katniss Eberdeen become primary cultural influences on tens of millions of real young adults. In short, The Hunger Games is the American Harry Potter.

   It does suffer from phoniness in how it depicts humanity operating under grotesquely insane situations. People don’t easily hunt people. Kids especially don’t. And if they did, they wouldn’t yuck it up like the cool kids at summer camp. Yet while killing is alien to the nature of teens, sexual attraction isn’t. Thus teen boys and girls would do The Deed if they found themselves alone in a luxo suite knowing that they were likely spending their last night on Earth.

   Despite flouting the above, the story wields power because the “tributes” look and sound like All American kids, albeit they’re operating in a bizarre hybrid of ancient Greek mythology and 22nd century virtual-reality game show. How messed up is the game play? It makes the games in Gladiator look civilized and today’s reality shows look like silent movies. Savage and supernatural, IOW. Somehow it all works.

   Bring on the sequels. We need more Katniss Everdeen. Grrrl power has never been like this before.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Enter the pantheon, Jennifer Lawrence, creator of the greatest Tough Girl yet, a new kind of action hero. Some critics have damned her with the faint praise of reprising her character from Winter’s Bone. More to the point is that her Ree Dolly and now her Katniss Everdeen are perhaps the most healthily strong female heroes the movies have ever seen, simultaneously post-feminist and neo-traditionalist. Katherine Hepburn must be looking down from Silver Screen Olympus realizing that she came along way too soon.

   Highlights from the large supporting cast:

   • Paula Malcomson as her emotionally devastated mother.
   • Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson as the two boys that flesh out her sweetly chaste love triangle. Both seem bound for stardom. Apparently Hemsworth narrowly lost out for the role of Thor to his older brother Chris.
   • Stanley Tucci as a pompadoured TV host and Toby Jones as his expert commentator.
   • Wes Bentley as an aspiring dictator with a spectacular beard and Donald Sutherland as the dictator he aspires to become.
   • A nearly unrecognizable Elizabeth Banks as an amoral hostess.
   • Woody Harrelson as a pickled champion.
   • Lenny Kravitz as a nice-guy handler.
   • Amandla Stenberg as a touching little girl.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    How big is this film? The credits included three dozen stunt players, along with three dozen grips and riggers, not to mention the sixty hairdressers. That last contingent was no doubt required to doll up the metropolitan sophisticates, who seem to take their fashion cues from Madame de Pompadour and the debauched court of Louis XV.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Very Good 3.5

    Expertly touches all the bases of young drama

    • Suicide pacts
    • Crushes
    • Love triangles
    • Family dysfunction
    • Outcasts

    The brilliant names sound familiar yet are largely original and wonderfully euphonious. Katniss Everdeen & Primrose Everdeen to name two. J. K. Rowling may not have met her match in Suzanne Collins, but they’re soaring in the same orbit.

13. Music Perfect 5.0

    Largely female soundtrack, mirroring Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, fem hero extraordinaire.

14. Visuals Really Great 4.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.4

    The killing of kids by other kids is handled tastefully, which seems an absurd sentence to write, but is true. Put it this way, the movie passed the no-need-to-cover-your-eyes test.

17. Sex Innocent 1.3

18. Violence Savage 4.0

19. Rudeness Salty 2.0

21. Reality

    Supernatural 3.3

    The Supernatural rFactor comes from the ability to convert virtual reality into actual reality, such as calling up fire-balls to hurtle through a forest, or wild animals to be created and unleashed out of thin air. Perhaps the book explains this away, but it appears supernatural in the movie.

    Now let’s talk politics. Both Left & Right can feel vindicated by what the movie implies.

    • The Right will note that the rich 1%ers who lord it over the plebeians in the Districts dress and act like addled urban sophisticates: Hollywoodites gone wild as it were. And that the economics are insane. Plus their technology is apparently more than sufficient to create prosperity for all, so why keep large segments of the population in servitude. Any society so operating wouldn’t for long.
    • The Left will note that the poor 99%ers are grievously put upon by the Man, notwithstanding their obvious goodness. Woody Guthry would recognize and approve of them.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 3.0

23. Biological Supernatural 3.1

    No bow hunter shoots pheasants out of the air, to quibble with one point.

24. Physical Supernatural 3.7