Half A Giraffe

The Hunger games

 

 

“Ciaran” my wife roars through the house ” The Hunger games has been released”. I put down my book and touch my brow, it is moist, I have been reading for 15 hours straight. I momentarily let my focus wander and I become aware of voices murmuring in the gardens behind the dark curtains of my room. Streams of light pass through the many little holes in their fabric suggesting a godly world beyond. I stand from my desk and walk towards the window, ripping them apart and at once I am bathed in light.

Beneath me the proletariat have gathered. They want me to review the Hunger Games. I look at their tiny peasanty faces, all scrunched up, shivering in the eternal winter of my front yard. I agree to their pleas and get my leather coat. Next stop, the cinema.

I take a seat in the middle, near a family of poor people. Around me the crackling of popcorn and the spooning of teenage couples. “Bah, this is no  place to watch a film critically” I muse to myself “still perhaps the babbling reproducing mess around will learn something, after all this film was based on a book”.

I exited the cinema around two hours later. A lot of people seemed to like it. It will be hard to tell them how retardedly wrong they are, and yet it is my duty. The sound of lips licking the bottom of popcorn buckets surrounds me on all sides, I begin to push my way through the sticky body-fluid people and head quickly for my home.

At my desk I start to pace up and down. “Perhaps I should give them what they want” I consider to myself. But the smells of tobacco, leather and poetry shake me to my senses.  They’ve got to know the truth. I sit down and begin to type.

“The biggest issue with the Hunger Games is that everybody is a retard. Nobody’s actions make any sense at all and the protagonist survives largely through luck or the ineptitude of others rather than her own skill.

Let’s take the scene where Katniss (the protagonist) climbs a tree to escape a mob of about 6 people trying to kill her. We then see that the boy from district 1, who is 18 and an elite fighter/survivor who has trained for years, is incapable of climbing a tree that she can climb.

We know one of the six has a bow and arrow and yet they give up trying to shoot her after trying only 2 arrows, even though both shots were close, instead resolving to sleep under the tree and wait her out. The fact that nobody else takes a shot with the bow and arrow suggests nobody can shoot a stationary human sized target in the fairly low branches of a tree. This makes me wonder why they bothered taking a bow and arrow at all.

The boy from district 12 (henceforth “dumb boy”) has been accepted into this group as he will lead them to her. It’s unclear why he does this as he loves her, and it’s unclear why the other group members don’t kill him after he has lead them to her. And so the group of 6 people, none of whom can climb and none of which can use a bow and arrow, sleep under the tree. Everybody sleeps at the same time, nobody stands guard.

Then the little girl appears and points out the enormous, loud hive of hallucinogenic wasps living on the tree. These wasps were clearly not there the day before, as we never hear them and none of the 6, admittedly fairly dim, characters trying to kill her have noticed it, nor has Katniss who apparently is an excellent forest/ranger type.

This is just one scene which occurs fairly soon after the movie properly begins but already it’s establishing a premise of Katniss receiving exceptional luck and everybody else being unbelievably inept.

Later we see that the elite guy and his friends are camped out in the open surrounded by forest, a tactic so dumb it beggars belief. If your only real enemy (remember that Katniss is officially ranked the most dangerous and they’ve previously dedicated considerable effort to catching her during which one of them died) is able to climb very well and is armed with a long range weapon, you don’t camp in a tiny meadow surrounded by trees. If I were Catnips, I’d have climbed up a tree and killed them all with arrows right then and there.

This leads us to my next point. The too-convenient killing off of friendly characters so as to avoid any kind of interesting dilemma. It’s a minor point but one which shows the laziness of the writing. The little girl is killed by getting hit with a spear (the spear thrower either aimed for her, a low value target when standing beside a high value one, or is inept at throwing his weapon of choice over a short distance) and the black guy who randomly saves her life is shown being killed by the mega-dogs. More on the ability of these mega-dogs to outrun a human later.

The intelligent girl dies by eating poison berries. Again a nice character, guilt-free removed to avoid any potentially interesting psychology later. It’s worth noting that her actions are inconsistent with what we’ve been told about her. The protagonist remarks that she was too clever for her own good. This is despite the fact that she chose to follow dumb boy who by his own admission is extremely incapable of surviving in the wild.

Furthermore she doesn’t know about the berries being poisonous, even though this appears to be relatively common knowledge. The Catnip can instantly identify them and the same berries are used later to kill the organiser of the hunger games, suggesting knowledge of their danger is relatively widespread. Thus we see a character, apparently defined by high intelligence, done in by making stupid decisions and having a lack of basic knowledge.

So the characters of the intelligent girl and the elite guy from district 1 suffer from the same basic problem. We are only ever told that these characters have apparently formidable attributes, everything we see suggests neither is capable of what they are meant to be excellent at. We never see the elite guy do anything at all that suggests he is a great fighter, survivor or tactician. I’ve just taken these two characters as examples, but what I’ve said is true for essentially everybody, except Catnip.

In a movie like this, where the premise is so alien and the setting so fantastical, having characters seem believable is especially important in creating immersion, something this movie largely fails to do.

Shakey camera crap, my old nemesis and destroyer of all that is good action, makes a massive big fat cock-in-your-eye appearance every time the action starts. However he also makes an appearance during much of the opening parts of the movie, in which characters just talking to one another do so whilst wobbling on screen.  This is presumably done to add a sense of drama and tension, much like the way a child telling a story might start shouting at the bits he thinks are important.

Finally the premise of this movie, children being forced to kill each other, is intrinsically horrible. It seems strange to watch horrible stuff voluntarily/in ones spare time, but it can be rewarding provided there’s a powerful message or the characters are transformed though their suffering. But here there is no message. Most of the characters that died did so through bad luck and Katniss is never forced to confront her identity or transform in some positive way, so I’m left wondering what’s the point?

Oh! The mega-dogs chase the main two characters through the forest for ages at close distance without catching them. Now, my tiny Pomeranian dog can outrun the crap out of me. If she were 20 feet behind me and we both started running she’d have caught me in about 1.5 seconds. Mega-dogs are presumably at least as twice fast as Roxy, so given that they can’t catch 2 kids from a distance of about 10 feet in approximately 1 min this indicates an exaggeration factor of (20/10)*(60/1.5)*2 = 160. The dogs should have caught them 160 times, give or take.

So with everybody being incredibly inept, animals that run at below human jogging pace and exceptional luck, I’m led to believe I could win the hunger games. I also believe my Pomeranian could win.”

Thus the review was completed.

“Ciaran” bellowed my wife through the floorboards beneath my slippers “WE’VE GOT GUESTS OVER AND YOU’VE BEEN HIDING IN YOUR ROOM FOR THE LAST HOUR, COME DOWN AND SAY HELLO”.

Silly woman, the world is not all fun and games. Somebody has to tell the people how crap this film is.

“OH JESUS CIARAN ARE YOU HAVING DELUSIONS THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS AGAIN”

I open the curtains and step into the blossoming radiance. Attention all ye gathered here, the Hunger Games sucks, I’d give it a 4/10.

BOOO bobooo nooooo

Well fuck you all then, stupid proletariat know it alls. I’ll go get my gun and kill them all. As I step back into my room my wife is standing there crying “Please don’t get your gun and start shooting out the windows again”.

Alright fine, what a bitch.

Posted in Staff Writer |