It’s a delicate balancing act, adapting a cult novel to the big screen – keeping the psychological depth while condensing the story into a couple of hours – but it’s a challenge that the creators of The Hunger Games rise to with aplomb. Perhaps it helps that author Suzanne Collins co-wrote the screenplay.
Collins and co-writer Gary Ross – who also directed the film – hone Collins’ complex saga with its multiple strands of plot into a lean and gripping film that feels much less than its 142 minutes. And, aided by Jennifer Lawrence’s (Winter’s Bone) lead performance, they don’t lose any of the psychological nuances that helped make the novel so compelling.
It’s the gift of fine acting to communicate in a glance ambiguities that would take a page or more to describe and Lawrence does so effortlessly, despite claiming in a 2010 interview never to have taken any acting lessons.
For those unfamiliar with the story, The Hunger Games is set in Panem, a media-obsessed dictatorship built on the ashes of a post-apocalyptic North America. Segregated into twelve districts of varying shades of poverty, Panem’s citizens are forced by their government in the Capitol to make a yearly tribute of twelve pairs of teenage boys and girls, one from each district, to fight to the death in the televised Hunger Games.
This may sound familiar to anyone who’s seen Series 7: The Contenders, Daniel Minahan’s pitch-dark 2001 satire on reality TV, but The Hunger Games is a more colourful affair than Minahan’s film, the first of a trilogy encompassing such epic themes as revolution, sacrifice and technological brilliance unfettered by ethical concerns.
The film rises to the other big challenge of adapting a novel: competing with readers’ imaginations. It has a visual style all of its own. The rough, hand-held early scenes with their Depression-era images of rural poverty make a striking contrast with the lushness of the Capitol scenes, which are more reminiscent of a Vivienne Westwood-ised Ancient Rome than 1930’s America. Of course, these visual influences are present in the book, but the film crystallises them.
Most dystopian sci-fi looks to the past as well as the future in order to show up civilisation’s constants as well as its progress and the Roman theme is picked up in the depictions of life in the Capitol. Over the course of the film we learn that forced suicide, a common practice in Ancient Rome, has been revived, along with a gladiatorial appreciation of death as a spectacle – and even a taste for pretty, polysyllabic names like Octavia and Seneca.
The film is well-balanced between the early scenes of life in District 12, Katniss’ (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta’s (Josh Hutcherson) home territory, the Capitol scenes with their sickening and enchanting decadence, and the scenes in the arena of the Hunger Games where the promised menace is realised.
From here on the pace doesn’t let up, resulting in an exciting, fast-paced and epic adaptation.
Released in UK cinemas on Friday 23rd March 2012 by Lionsgate.
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