Thursday, April 5, 2012

The Hunger Games!

Well, I wrote a short summary of The Hunger Games movie for school and I thought I'd share it with you.
Here it is!



The Hunger Games is a wildly popular new movie set in a dystopian future where an all-powerful, high-tech centralized government known as the Capitol rules over 12 "districts" of populations ranging from  third-world to extremely wealthy conditions depending on their closeness to the Capitol . The film is set 74 years after a unanimous uprising that failed to overthrow the corrupt, socialist government. As punishment for the uprising, the all-powerful government now requires each of the 12 districts to "volunteer" a girl and boy between the age of 12 and 18 each year to participate in the Hunger Games – a gladiator style bloodsport event that serves as entertainment for the upper-class who live at the capitol. Twenty-four competitors go in and only one comes out, awarded with food bonuses for his or her home district along with housing for the rest of their life.  So when the story's heroine, 16-year-old Katniss, selflessly steps up to take her younger sister's place in the Reaping, she knows she's likely signing her own death sentence. The movie has a strong moral compass and strongly supports sacrifice, kindness, and friendship. The movie also definitely leaves you with some serious things to consider. Are we, as a society, in danger of becoming like Panem?  Could we become so bloodthirsty as to willingly give up our children and enjoy watching them die? Or have we become so complacent that we would allow an all-powerful government to steal our arms for themselves and our children for their entertainment? The Hunger Games has some very solid messages to deliver. Seeing it has stuck with me, and definitely caused me to think a lot on the matter. That alone would have made it worth it my opinion.  The Hunger Games appeared to me as a wake-up call for America showing just how close we might be to the pit of an all-powerful government and the arena type entertainment of Greece and Rome.  Our culture is slowly becoming more and more like Panem and the cold-hearted citizens depicted there. Throughout numerous scenes such as Katniss’s instructor crying when he sees a boy gleefully pretending to kill his playmate with a fake sword just before the games begin, or the heroine weeping over the body of a dead tribute and covering her body with flowers, the characters clearly show that the celebration of this mindless killing is wrong. To quote from the book, “We do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.” But according to some eyewitnesses, not everybody gets the point. One commentator said, “I went to see the movie at midnight like so many of you and was reasonably impressed at what the filmmakers put together. But one thing particularly disturbed me. During the scene where Katniss is attacked by Clove, the audience started applauding when Clove was killed. This seemed to me to be sadly ironic; they had fallen into the very thing that Collins [The Author of the series] was trying to warn against. And as laudable as the book's central message of violence awareness is, I think it's largely lost on many of the book's fans.”
Aside from all that, the film was extremely well made, has a fantastic soundtrack, and has the most intense trailer I have ever seen in my life. I personally am dying to see it again, and, knowing what the point of the movie was, count it as one of my favorites.

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