Iron Geek
Kasri Noireau
Iron Geek
smrtness
Iron Geek
It's like Battle Royale except no-one learns anything and it's intensely boring as well as squandering an excellent premise.
"It's like Battle Royale" = code words of everyone who has never read all of the books.
This isn't about the books, dear. It's a bland film where the protagonist learns nothing; even in Clerks the main character learns something and that's essentially a film about nothing. This has an excellent premise and turns it into a 2 hour slog.
Though I will concede that than one bit where she threw up the three finger salute and everyone rioted was great.
But otherwise zzzz.
I think it's less about the protagonist having any kind of personal epiphany than showing how she is broken by the experience. Because dear GOD is she broken. The learning - cynical and twisted as it is - kind of takes place in the sequels where there's more active rebellion against the Capitol.
I found it by and large to be quite good, if a little lighter and cleaner than the novel. I'll admit, I don't know much at all about Battle Royale, but from what little I can glean, I think they were going for a different kind of message and scope.
Battle Royale is essentially five/ten minutes of a bunch of school kids being told they're going to fight to the death because the government say so. Then they fight to the death for the rest of the movie. Not a great film but I enjoyed it more than the Hunger Games because it wasn't stilted and slow.
In what sense was she broken? She beat the system and saved that kid she most definitely should have killed. She didn't have to do anything that was beyond her, morally and when you're thrust into that kind of situation the limits to what you're willing to do have to be tested.
Also threatening to kill yourself when you have a family who is reliant on you is an incredibly foolish move.
Apparently there's a graphic novel version of Battle Royale? It sounds interesting, but really confronting. They apparently play up the senseless violence a lot.
Oh, I'd say she was asked to do things that were morally beyond her. Killing someone for no other reason than that you've been told to is going to screw a person over, even if they did happen to be the designated assholes. She's also burned, poisoned, deafened, cut, starved and dehydrated for what... two weeks? And at the last second is told she has to either kill someone she's emotionally invested in and who she believed up until the end was going to live. Katniss comes out
traumatised, and with good reason, she was pushed physically and mentally past her limit so, so far. That's the point of the Games, it's not a test or a competition, it's an exercise in breaking people down, whether they live or they die. I think calling it a test implies that she as a seventeen year old girl
should be able to survive in horrific conditions and kill up to 23 people she has no reason to want to hurt if that's what the situation requires, which I think is demanding an unrealistic level of resilience. It's a tough call, because it's a mindset that you really can't understand without being in a similar situation and (thank god) there isn't really anything similar. But anyway.
Threatening to kill yourself is a foolish move. At that point, I don't think the girl had enough rationality left in her, she just wanted to do whatever she could to rob the Capitol of their victory over her one way or another, which supports the idea that the Games broke her. At least, that was my reading.
I know you're restricting the scope of the conversation to the movie, but that's really difficult because I read the trilogy first and so a lot of what I got from the movie was informed by the books. ^^;
100
100
100
