BEFORE: Dayo Okeniyi carries over from "Runner Runner", and that enables me to follow the Ben Affleck chain with a 6-film Jennifer Lawrence chain. I've managed to avoid the "Hunger Games" franchise until now, why watch it here? I'm glad you asked...
I wish I could say it's a neat tie-in with Thanksgiving - but honestly I didn't notice the verbal connection with one of America's best eating-based holidays until just recently. If I had, I might have worked a little harder to get more films in last week, so at least I could get the first film in this series a little closer to Thanksgiving Day. "My bad" on that front. The truth is that when I was planning this chain, I worked off the release dates of "Justice League" and the upcoming "Star Wars" film - I knew I had a few more Ben Affleck films, and at the same time I worked the connections backwards from "The Last Jedi", hoping to meet somewhere in the middle.
What I got was a 5-film gap, squarely between the two chains. But the latter chain started with a Jennifer Lawrence film, so I thought maybe this 4-film series would help fill this gap, provided I could come up with a connection between any of those 4 post-Justice League Ben Affleck films and the first "Hunger Games" movie - which did exist, and it was Dayo Okeniyi. That still left me one film short for the year, but I added "Rush" to the Chris Hemsworth chain, and then I had my plan that would take me to the end of 2017.
Why did I avoid "The Hunger Games" for so long? There seem to be a few franchises that I just have no interest in, like the "Fast and Furious" or "Transformers" films. There are still a few other famous franchises that I'm very late in viewing, like the "Rambo" movies, or horror franchises like "Halloween", "Scream" and "Friday the 13th", which are just not my bag. But I didn't have anything against "The Hunger Games", in fact they're such a part of pop culture that watching them now is basically an afterthought on my part, like the "Harry Potter" movies. In fact I'm going to treat these four films much like I treated the "Harry Potter" ones - I'm watching them just to familiarize myself with them and stay current on trivia, I don't necessarily plan to enjoy them, but it doesn't make sense to keep avoiding them, either.
But once I made the decision to finally commit to this franchise, then I had to figure out how to watch them. At the time I worked them into the plan, no TV channel seemed to be running them, at least not without commercials, so I kind of missed my window there. The films were on iTunes, but at full price of about $10-$12 per rental. But I figured I could buy the box set of all four films on Amazon for about $24, and I made a mental note to do this around the end of October, so it would be sure to arrive in time. When I checked iTunes a couple weeks later, the price had come down to just $3.99 per film to rent, so that would cut the cost down to $16 and save me a few bucks. Last week all four films showed up On Demand for free - 3 run by TNT (with commercials) and the fourth on ePix. So now I can watch all the films at no cost, but to save some time and skip the ads, I think I'll still watch the first three on iTunes, for $12 total.
THE PLOT: Katniss Everdeen voluntarily takes her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games: a televised competition in which two teenagers from each of the twelve districts of Panem are chosen at random to fight to the death.
AFTER: Now that I've seen the film, I have so many questions about this dystopian future - not really about how society got there, because I think many people might agree that with everything in the news this year, this is where we're heading - between climate change, political upheaval, and scandal after scandal, it won't be long before we won't be arguing over "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays", we'll all just be saying "Happy Hunger Games", and "May the odds be ever in your favor." The book's author probably intended this to be a few hundred years in America's future, but now I'm thinking it's just a few years out.
I'm just kidding, they refer to the 74th Annual Hunger Games, so clearly this competition's been around for some time, and therefore this is set far in the future - but what, exactly happened in their past to set this up? If it was a nuclear war or other apocalypse, then humanity would seem to have recovered nicely - umm, except for the enforced teenage gladiatorial contests, of course. There's reference to some kind of rebellion that set up the Hunger Games, but the real details are incredibly unclear. How, exactly, does sacrificing two teenagers from each district preserve the peace? It seems to make sense to everyone in that society, but not to me - does watching a TV show where teens kill each other just satisfy everyone's bloodlust, so nobody feels the need to wage war, or is there something about the contest that precludes further bloodshed? Because if the districts are really in competition with each other, there doesn't seem to be reason why there can't be both the Hunger Games AND a war between 2 districts, for example.
Perhaps they will explain this further in the following films, or maybe I need to read the plot of the books on Wikipedia, to get some further insight. I have a feeling that maybe the movie took some shortcuts and didn't dumb the situation down for people like me, who did not read the novels. But since I went into this film series cold (more or less) I don't want to read any spoilers now.
Another question - is the choice of tributes really random? Was everyone given one ticket in the lottery drawing, or did some people get their names in the bowl multiple times? Someone made a reference to their name being on 42 slips of paper, but it wasn't really clear how this came about. Another time Katniss told her sister not to "take any more food from them", so she wouldn't be at risk in the future. So is there a relation between eating food and being chosen for the games? This was really unclear, and could have been explained better. (EDIT: Yes, the novel apparently clarifies that putting one's name in the Hunger Games lottery additional times will gain their family extra food.)
This ties in with my next question - why is it called the "Hunger Games"? Is there some connection to how much food the district receives, like is there a shortage of food in the future, and does winning the Hunger Games get those citizens more food? There were some shots of food being weighed out on scales, but I don't think what was going on was explicitly stated - for those of us who did not read the books, this could have been made a lot more clear. I thought maybe the competitors were just really "hungry" to win, but now this sounds quite stupid if there's a more tangible connection to getting food.
There are so many other things I don't understand about the selection process, and the future in general. Some districts sent kids to compete - but obviously the older, bigger kids would have an advantage, they would be stronger and have had more time to train. So how does it benefit a district to send a younger kid, someone less likely to defend themselves. Or would they therefore be able to run faster and hide better, essentially playing a different kind of defensive game from the larger "hunter" teens? Plus, who's to say someone doesn't tamper with the voting process?
Which leads me to my first NITPICK POINT: if some districts, like #1 and #2, have contestants who have trained their whole lives for the Hunger Games, how is that fair? How did those contestants know that they'd be picked, and therefore devote their lives to training? Is the selection process not random in those districts? And for that matter, why can't contestants train their whole lives in Districts #11 and #12? They know that they'll be competing next year and the year after that, so what's preventing them from being competitive, just their relative poverty? That's a poor excuse.
Regarding gameplay - why would any four or five competitors form any kind of alliance? Any fan of the "Survivor" show should realize how tenuous any alliance would be - if 5 competitors teamed up to get ahead and eliminate the others, they would immediately have to turn on each other if they managed to be successful in this regard. So any alliance would be undermined by the possibility of needing to also eliminate one's allies. On the other hand, players on "Survivor" are always wary of "power couples", alliances of two, because two people working together can go very far together - but since everyone knows this fact, power couples then tend to be broken up by the other players as soon as possible. So they don't end up working in the end, because of this anti-strategy.
The Hunger Games take place in a giant arena that's part bio-dome, part holodeck - but this just leads me to more questions. I get that maybe in the future there's not much left of the Earth's original plant and animal life, so it makes sense that mankind would find a way to genetically engineer wildlife, in order to preserve it. But to me this is still a NITPICK POINT, because if mankind is going to use technology to keep certain species alive, like bees for example, why the heck would they create killer bees with deadly hallucinogenic venom? This seems counter-productive to keeping humans alive in the long run.
I'm going to assign another NITPICK POINT to the fact that the rules of the Games are changed several times, in order to accommodate the needed plot twists. Imagine the rules of any major-league sport or the Olympics being changed WHILE you're watching them, as a fan wouldn't you be upset by this? If they suddenly made a forward pass illegal during the Super Bowl so one team couldn't score, there would be an uproar. So this seemed just a little too convenient to bring about the desired result in this story.
Still, I found there was a lot for me to like here. A bunch of millennials killing each other on camera, what's not to like? (OK, so maybe their characters are from the next millennium, it still counts.)
Also starring Jennifer Lawrence (last seen in "Joy"), Josh Hutcherson (last heard in "Epic"), Liam Hemsworth (last seen in "Paranoia"), Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Lenny Kravitz (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Spotlight"), Donald Sutherland (last seen in "Start the Revolution Without Me"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Interstellar"), Toby Jones (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Alexander Ludwig (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Isabelle Fuhrman (last seen in "After Earth"), Amandla Stenberg (last heard in "Rio 2"), Jacqueline Emerson, Jack Quaid, Leven Rambin (last seen in "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters"), Willow Shields, Paula Malcomson (last seen in "Tombstone"), Latarsha Rose, Ian Nelson, Kalia Prescott, Ethan Jamieson, Mackenzie Lintz, Imanol Yepez-Frias, Annie Thurman, Dakota Hood, Steve Coulter (last seen in "The Founder"), Sharon Conley, Tim Taylor, John Ross.
RATING: 7 out of 10 nightlock berries
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