The Hunger Games- A Cautionary Tale

First of all, I'd like to thank the MPAA for giving this tale of teenagers hacking each other to death a PG-13 rating.  It is perfect commentary for a moralistic story about a society desensitized to violence. The Hunger Games may not be the most violent picture ever made, but no amount of pure violence can garner an R rating. But, fuck, this fucking sentence is rated R. Show a nipple? That's an R. Gay stuff? NC-17. The MPAA has an anything goes attitude with regards to violence, but treats sex and cursing like cardinal sins. This is not how the rating system should work. They should be rating violence more restrictively than sex and far more restrictively than language.

What struck me watching the film is how poorly designed the Hunger Games were for their intended purpose. The Hunger Games are supposed to be the circuses part of the old Roman bread and circuses style government, but how they were managed the games were more likely to cause a rebellion than prevent one.

The first mistake of the Panem government is the hunger part of The Hunger Games. The Romans may have been brutal conquerors, but they were surprisingly benevolent governors. The Romans knew that hungry people are angry people. They always made sure that the basic needs of their people were met. The Capitol did not have such regard for their citizens.

In The Hunger Games, 24 children are taken away from their homes and forced to fight to the death. No matter how apathetic the people get, one of the few things everyone is willing to fight to the death for is their children. You want to get people angry? You want to start an insurrection? Try randomly kidnapping and executing the most adorable kids you can find. Just look at the riots in District 11 over cute, little Rue being cutely speared in the chest.

After snatching the children from the poverty and starvation they have been living in, they make sure they experience the finest side of Capitol life. They are given more food than they can possibly eat. They live in total opulence. They are given a true first-hand view of the great inequity of Panem society. And then, knowing that they are likely to die very soon, they give them the biggest microphone imaginable. They are put on live, national TV for days on end on a program certain to be viewed by nearly everyone in the country. They are offered effectively unlimited time to rail against the oppressive government and wealth inequity. And what could the government do to shut them up, kill them? Shut off their mics? They are probably dead already. And stopping them like that would only prove them right. The government could go after their family which is probably what keeps the kids in line, but at some point one of them will take the risk because the government has so effectively demonstrated how little they had back home and how much there is to fight for. 

So for any aspiring dictators reading this, I suggest using adult prisoners of below average intelligence for your gladiatorial games. The criminals should be guilty of serious, violent offenses. This will prevent backlash at their deaths. It should also provide a higher level of competition than randomly chosen children. Should they chose to use the forum politically, which is unlikely from the less intelligent members of the prison community, they will probably be ignored. I'm not saying you should brutally oppress millions of people, but if you do, please be smart about it.

Now, all of this might have eluded me had this film not had one of the worst SAMs in cinematic history. A SAM, or Stupidity Awareness Moment, is the instantaneous conversion of a movie from an entertaining film into a laughable mess of illogic. A Stupidity Awareness Moment is a moment so stupid and illogical that it causes you to question not just the logic of the scene it is in, but the logic of every moment of the film. The SAM in The Hunger Games comes as Katniss is being chased by a pack of other kids and chooses to climb a tree. Katniss choosing to trap herself in a tree is SAM worthy in and of itself, but the true SAM comes a few seconds later when the pursuing gang after missing with a few arrows just stops firing. Here they are with their enemy trapped in range of a projectile weapon with effectively unlimited ammunition and they don't finish her off? It is the worst strategic planning I have seen in any movie. And, then they further compound their mistake by all taking a nap. One of the primary reasons for the gang to exist is that they can sleep in shifts and they all go to sleep within sight of the enemy? It is perfect execution of the very rare triple-SAM. For the record, this SAM is also in the book and it is the principal reason I never read the later books.