Happy Sunday Bookshelf Battlers! May the bookshelves be ever in your favor…
The Bookshelf Battler (that’s me, I’m just an important person who refers to himself in the third person) saw the latest installment of the blockbuster book based movie franchise, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1 in an early Thursday night showing. The place was packed. People love these movies.
For those unfamiliar with the books and/or movies (I don’t know, maybe you’ve been too busy coal mining in District 12 to follow pop culture), the series takes place in the chaotic future land of Panem, where the the snobby rich evildoers who run “the Capitol” bask in luxurious lifestyles built on the backs of the poor laborers who toil away in the Districts. No, it was not written by Occupy Wall Street. The story follows Katniss, played by Jennifer Lawrence in the role that made her career, as she battles the Capitol’s leader, the sinister President Snow (played by Donald Sutherland. Yes, he’s still alive).
The series begins with the original Hunger Games in which the Capitol revels in watching an annual extreme reality TV show competition – i.e. The Hunger Games. Every year, all the districts are required to cough up one young male and one young female to compete in a free-for-all, fight to the last person standing competition.
Here is a parody of my conversation with the world when I saw the first film in 2012:
WORLD: Oh wow! The Hunger Games is so awesome! Go Katniss! Wooo! Yeah!
ME: Umm…wait a minute. Am I the only one who is disturbed by the fact that this is a movie about children murdering other children?
WORLD: Wow! Katniss has a burning fire dress! What a great movie! Woohoo!
ME: How did this even get published? Did somebody just walk into a publisher’s office and say, “Yeah, hey listen, check it out, I’ve got this great idea for a novel. It’s the future. All these kids are thrown into a dome full of guns, machetes, and weapons and they are forced to shoot each other and hack each other to pieces.”
WORLD: Woohoo! Great movie!
ME: I mean, isn’t this pretty much the The Running Man with kids?
WORLD: Running what? Shut up! We’re trying to watch the movie! Katniss is going to unleash a bunch of futuristic killer bees on some kids!
ME: The Running Man. It was a very violent 1980’s movie starring Arnold Schwarzennegger and Jesse Ventura. It was a futuristic game show where convicted criminals were forced to do battle. Arnold was wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and he had to battle his way out of an obstacle course filled with all kinds of evil psychopaths. It’s like somebody went to Hollywood and said, “Let’s make The Running Man but with kids!”
WORLD: Shut up. Those guys were governors. They weren’t in any movies.
But I suppose once you get around the Lord of the Flies-esque nature of the Hunger Games, it isn’t that bad a series. I noticed that in the sequel, Catching Fire, there is another Hunger Games battle royale in which grown up adult winners of the past games come back to compete. I hope this means someone, somewhere said, “Hey wait a minute, let’s cool it on the child vs. child killing competitions.”
Eventually, as the series moves along, it becomes less about the competition and more about Katniss becoming a revolutionary freedom fighter, working to take down President Snow’s corrupt government. In other words, it starts to become a sci-fi action fantasy and that’s a direction that’s easier to get behind.
In Mockingjay: Part I we finally see Katniss come into her own as a symbol of hope for the anti-Capitol uprising. Lots of action, special effects, and so on. Overall, it’s a great series of books and despite my above criticisms (what work is without flaws?) I still find them shelf-worthy.
Bookshelf Battle 