Closer look at ‘The Hunger Games’

ment - are a reminder to their watching communities that the districts are still paying for an old sin, an uprising against the Capitol that was brutally suppressed. Enter Katniss – ‘the girl of fire’ – the only tribute to ever volunteer from District 12. What lies ahead will test her to breaking point but Katniss is about to become an unlikely heroine. Will she be the catalyst for another uprising?

What’s to love about ‘The Hunger Games’? For everyone who got very quickly tired of Bella’s relationship issues, you’ll find more meat on these bones. This is post-apocalyptic fiction where characters are concerned with more than their next date. Food shortages, repressive regimes, abandonment, betrayal and the struggle to simply survive another day in a hostile world give teenage angst a whole new dimension.

Most fans want to know whether the movies do the books justice, recognizing all the while that it’s nearly impossible to cram all the fine details in – it’s why we barely skim the surface of Katniss’ attachment to Gale, for instance. We’re pleased to be introduced to Lenny Kravitz as Katniss’ inventive stylist Cinna but her costumes (a point of some drama in the books) are disappointingly underwhelming. The violence of the games is also muted, but one is thankful for that, even if the film makers still don’t succeed in making the films appropriate for young children. An addition that works very well though are the sequences depicting the game makers at work in their war room. They control the vast, forested arena from there, whether they’re announcing the death of a tribute, organising sweeping forest fires or releasing terrifying mutations. It only heightens our awareness of how cruel and callous the Games really are, as the gamers deliberately set out to inflict horrific deaths on the tributes.

The thing to celebrate though is Katniss herself. ‘May the odds always be in her favour.’