New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

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.

Continued:       1       2       3