![]() Perhaps the reason that the The Hunger Games book series has a reputation for brutality while the movie comes off as relatively tame exists in an unavoidable discrepancy in media perception. But Ross's vision is very much in line with Collins's. A few are altered (instead of having her skull dented after being bashed with a rock, one victim is thrown up against a giant metal cornucopia, though we don't see it or a head wound) and gore is stripped away (the festering burns and bites of the book look like Freddy Krueger's face at worst). Instances in the book where death is implied (a far-off cry from a foolish girl who starts a campfire, thus attracting her murderers) remain intact. It's that quick," Collins writes later on, and that's really how it happens in the movie. "I can see the muscles ripple in Cato's arms as he sharply jerks the boy's head to the side. The participants (tributes) have pooled together around a supply pile and taken deadly advantage of the proximity. Several lie dead already on the ground," she writes. Typically, she confines her goriest descriptions to no more than two sentences the film offers them in about five seconds.Īt the start of the games, Collins surveys the battlefield: "About a dozen or so tributes are hacking away at one another at the horn. How can the film remain true to the book if it's shying away from brutality?Įasily, actually, since Collins never dwells much on violence herself. Virtually every feature written about the film ponders the violence question up top, and virtually every review you'll read today attacks the issue. Less than a month after Ross was announced director, he announced that the film would be rated PG-13. ![]() The violence question has been inherent to The Hunger Games since the movie was announced, and for many of us before that: When I read the book, which is often so blatant and carefully rendered that it feels like a screenplay outline, I wondered how the hell they were going to pull off portraying the Battle Royale-style massacre reality show that Katniss's dystopian government forces teens into annually. It often feels like an ingenious workaround of the constraints of PG-13 and our supposed cultural sensitivity. Ross pulls it off with a host of tricks like shaky-cam blurring, tasteful squirts of blood (well, as tasteful as squirts of blood can be) and selective montages that focus more on the effect (lifeless corpses) than the cause (say, bludgeoning). It's a dance, incorporating the violent deaths of more than 20 teenagers into a film whose blockbuster aspirations aim it virtually at all age groups. The Young Adult trilogy-turned-blockbuster is due out this weekend,… Seriously, What Are The Hunger Games and Why Should I Care if I'm Not 14? The real sport of The Hunger Games, Gary Ross's compulsively entertaining cinematic adaptation, is breezing by those murders without offending delicate sensibilities. "The real sport of the Hunger Games is watching the tributes kill one another," says protagonist Katniss Everdeen in the first book of Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |