Book vs. Movie: The Hunger Games
By Russ Bickerstaff
March 28, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins began writing for children’s TV shows in the early 1990s. After meeting with children’s author James Proimos, she figured that writing children’s novels wouldn’t be that difficult, so she banged out a few of them of her own. Her first books were inspired by Alice In Wonderland. Then she wrote The Hunger Games, a dystopian science fiction story with a strong female protagonist, set in a United States that looks very similar to our own. The Hunger Games Trilogy became hugely successful. The first two Hunger Games books were bestsellers. It didn’t take long for Collins to start talking with Hollywood. Already a seasoned scriptwriter, she has adapted the book into the script for a big-budget motion picture that has, in its first week of release, already shown a staggering profit over its $78 million production budget. But how does the hugely successful film compare with the novel it was based on?
The Book
As the book opens, we are introduced to the protagonist and her family. Her mother and her sister are there. As it turns out, she’s a hunter. She goes out to poach game to help feed her family. She lives in a country called Panem, which evidently is the US after some kind of massive apocalyptic event. A number of districts answer to a totalitarian authority. It’s not a big, happy fascist dictatorship, though. Evidently one of the original 13 districts rose up against the government and was subsequently squelched. Now the remaining districts are reminded of the power of the rule of the Panem government by way of annual televised games involving a group of children fighting each other to death.
Okay. Fine. Stop it right there. This is all interesting and everything, but it IS kind of derivative. (There’s a lot of precedence here, most recently the 1999 novel Battle Royale, but also the old video game SMASH TV, the older film The Running Man…Beyond Thunderdome, Death Race 2000 and a seemingly endless parade of dystopian death-duel sci-fi stories that stretch back arguably to the dawn of the sci-fi genre.) But where did the idea come from this time? As legend has it, Suzanne Collins was flipping through channels when she found herself spotting the rather dramatic juxtaposition between a reality show and the invasion of Iraq. This gave her the idea for The Hunger Games. Okay, fine, but that doesn’t make the idea terribly original. This sort of thing has been done before - which is perfectly fine so long as Collins can do something with it that is fresh and new. Certainly if that were the case, it would go a long way towards explaining the novel’s commercial success.
Sadly, as the novel progresses, Collins doesn’t seem to be putting a whole lot of effort into making the premise seem at all plausible. In the “real world,” there isn’t a whole lot of precedence for a totalitarian government using lethal televised games to squelch any idea about people rising up against it. That sort of thing would probably only make people angrier. People are very, very protective of their children. Any society that would ignore that basic instinct towards preservation of children to the degree that its found in Collins’ book would be fundamentally different from our own - which would be an interesting concept to read about if Collins wanted to explore it, but she does not.
We do, however, have some precedence for this kind of treatment of children. It has more to do with necessity, though. Children were treated like machines during the dawn of the industrial revolution. Back then, they were very, very cheap and docile labor for a system of control that helped build our country. So, why wouldn’t they be used for labor to rebuild our country? And in more violent milieus like the diamond mining cultures of Africa, children are given guns and used as disposable soldiers. But gladiatorial death games? That seems a little unlikely. Not that it’s entirely implausible, but as mentioned earlier, Collins doesn’t seem terribly interested in making the premise seem plausible.
Complete ambivalence towards plausibility can make for some pretty brilliant writing under the right circumstances. One of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick, was a master at it. For example: A man has an argument with the AI in his car about whether or not he’s sober enough to drive. For another: There’s a world where technology runs on prayer. Neither of these is at all plausible, but they’re clever enough to make up for it. Mark Leyner writes stuff that becomes fascinating by virtue of its implausibility. (Visceral tattoos? Somehow the idea just works.) Collins doesn’t attempt to make the implausibility very compelling, though, choosing instead to focus the story on the protagonist - Katniss. She’s a 16-year-old who is forced to be more responsible than anyone else in her family for various reasons. She’s a character who appeals to any kid who is about to hit the age where one feels the weight of the world on his or her shoulders. I’m willing to bet THAT is where the appeal of the book truly lies. (Well, that and marketing.)
People can comment on the topicality of the book in the current economic climate. There is a disparity between the wealthy and the poor - controlling and the controlled that bleeds out of the corners of the novel. This book only covers the bigger issues tangentially to a very derivative action-movie-style plot that has garnered a huge following. So how does the book compare to the actual action movie that’s based on it?
The Movie
The feel and pacing of the book arevery cinematic and action-oriented. As the idea was allegedly inspired by visuals on TV, it would seem to be a natural fit for cinema. And as the central draw of the story seems to be a powerful teenager, the film may be able to tap into a character-driven story with more immediacy than an uninspired prose style can deliver to the page.
In the early going, the film doesn’t seem to be all at interested in keeping any ort of rhythm or pacing. There’s a kind of stillness about it that feels very much as though it’s coming from an entirely different period of filmmaking. The Appalachia of the District 12 setting feels a lot more like a particularly dark episode of Little House on the Prairie than anything. As bits of the bigger society beyond the protagonist’s home district begin to seep-in, we begin to get the feel of a production design, which feels very much like ‘70s sci-fi with brief glimpses of the ‘80s. We get kind of a mix of THX-1138 and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange by way of Gilliam’s Brazil. It all feels kind of outdated - an earlier vintage a dark future than we’ve been exposed to in popular format in recent years.
A lot of the success of the dramatic end of the film lies on the shoulders of Jennifer Lawrence, who proves to be a really talented actress with good instincts for the screen. Director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, Pleasantville) does a really good job of capturing the long, slow migration of emotion across Lawrence’s face as the events of the story unfold. We get the sense of a remarkably competent girl who has a very pragmatic sense about her. It’s pretty compelling stuff dramatically because Ross doesn’t try to spend too much time trying to bring across the world of the story beyond the immediacy of the dramatic emotions playing through the events of the story.
Within the first half hour of the film, the story moves from the wilderness of District 12 to the Capital city. The protagonist’s little sister has been chosen for the death match, but she has volunteered to take her place. One boy has been chosen from her district as well as per the custom. The two of them are introduced to a past victor of the games from District 12, played here by Woody Harrelson, looking a bit like an aging Kurt Cobain had he lived to be an alcoholic.
Ross has cleverly focused the power of the story on the emotional drama that is driving it all. Yes, we get some images of the future here, including a few retro-looking images of the capital city, but by and large Ross trains the cameras on the unspoken emotions spoken across the faces of the characters.
If anything, the pacing of the film doesn’t take enough of the dramatic framing of the novel to heart to make this feel like a modern action film. The stillness of the whole thing extends beyond the establishing scenes pretty much through the rest of the whole film. It makes the story feel emotionally ominous without aspiring to much more than the basics of interpersonal human drama. To a certain extent, we’re not getting the larger feel of the emotional world where the story exits, which is kind of tragic, as even subtle hints of the world beyond the games would have gone a long way towards addressing the plausibility of the premise. That being said, as the movie is focused in on human emotion to the exclusion of all other concerns, the emotion reality of the story is brought across in reasonably compelling detail.
The Verdict
To date, the book has sold 2.9 million copies in print and another 1 million or more in the digital domain. This is by all accounts a very, very successful book that has become a success through appealing to its target demographic and probably some really, really clever marketing. Having been released a few years before the film, its reputation is likely to overshadow that of the film in the long-run due to its rapid-fire success early on. The film is irrevocably linked with the book, even though it’s likely to have been a bigger financial success over time. The film is actually more of an accomplishment as a work of pop art, having been able to rake in a huge amount of money as a drama-based action film. (As of opening weekend, it’s made $214 million worldwide on a movie budgeted somewhere in the vicinity of $80 million with an additional $45 million spent on advertising. Opening week looks to make more than $100 million in profit for the movie.) Perhaps this film will be further proof to Hollywood producers that the draw of the cinema still lies in the heart of a story’s appeal rather than the 3D IMAX gimmickry that they seem to have been occupying themselves with of late.