The Hunger Games: A Review

'May the odds be ever in your favour.'

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012, USA) is a harrowing sci-fi fantasy that is set in a dystopian society where a young girl, named Katniss Everdene (Jennifer Lawrence), defies their rulers and brings hope to the people. This film offers a rollercoaster of emotion with the fast-paced editing and fantastic performances as the audience is immersed into this futuristic world of mayhem, where the price you pay for freedom is very high.

The Hunger Games is set in Panem, which represents New York in the future after many disasters, both natural and man-made. The society is controlled by The Capitol, which is the governing state and is positioned in the centre of all the districts. There are 12 districts that surround the Capitol and the further away one ventures from the centre the poorer the districts become.

Katniss Everdene comes from district 12, the poorest of them all, at least since district 13 was completely destroyed. Since the uprising, that lead to the obliteration of district 13, every year each district has had to offer up a young man and woman aged between 12 and 18 years for the Hunger Games, where they fight to the death in a televised battle until one lone victor remains. These games serve as a reminder of the fact that the Capitol controls the land and people and there is no escape from this. With so much desensitised violence, it seems unlikely that there is any humanity left in the society. However, everything starts to change; people gain hope, when Katniss offers herself up as a volunteer tribute in place of her 12 year old sister, whose name was pulled out for the games.

With 24 opponents the odds are stacked against Katniss. Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the boy picked out from District 12 to take part in the games, expresses how he desperately wants to show the Capitol that they do not own him. That if he is to die then he wants to still be himself. He does not want to be consumed by them, leaving nothing but a murderous monster.

Katniss, herself, expresses her disgust at the Capitol and the society in which she lives when she confides in Gale (Liam Hemsworth), in the woods before the reaping, that she does not want children. She does not want to bring them into such a place. Gale suggests running off into the woods with Katniss, but this would be futile as they both know that they would be hunted down and either killed or mutilated.

In such a place, what is the price one has to pay in order to gain freedom? They can fight, and Katniss will have to in the games in order to survive, but is death the ultimate price one has to pay in order to be free? It seems that the blood thirsty Capitol is willing to do anything they can in order to keep the districts in line.

This consumerist society, where people consider senseless violence and brutality, such as the games, as entertainment and a chance to bet against the odds, offers a self critique of our own vision of reality and the society in which we live today. In our capitalist consumerist society we entertain ourselves on the expense of others, we become mindless consumers. We regularly watch people fighting wars, being killed, trying to win money and respect, everyday on Television and sometimes even with our own eyes. Yet, we except this, we gorge ourselves whilst others starve and we watch terror unfold whilst we laugh and joke amongst ourselves. We ignore the brutality that life can throw at us, because we are mindless consumers and there is no escape from this ideological state, as the film clearly shows.

The film, however, focuses on the adolescents in society, fore-warning them of what might come if they continue living in this consumerist society without taking action. With only Katniss, Peeta, and Rue (Amandla Stenberg) represented positively in the games, the other adolescents are presented as influenced consumers as they are killers, conspiring in packs and hunting down their opponents like animals. This suggests that it is the adolescents in society that are in need of change in order to gain their freedom from this society, which offers a culture of fear much like our very own media run society.

Survival, however, is promoted at any cost. Therefore, Katniss rebels in such a way that defies the Capitol’s authority and dangerously stirs the other districts.  Only the next two films will show us the price that they must pay in order to receive the freedom that they so long for.

This exhilarating film opens our eyes, through its brutal violence, to the consumerist society in which we live. It immerses us into dystopia where we root for the survival of Katniss and cling to the hope that she brings.

John Carter

With Disney’s biggest budget to date, of around $300 million, John Carter was set to be a big franchise event.

John Carter is a sci-fi action adventure, based on the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, about an ex-military  officer from the American civil war who accidently gets teleported to Barsoom (Mars), where he gains powers due to the gravitational difference compared to Earth. He gets involved in the civil war that is taking place on Barsoom and fights to save the Princess of Helium from a horrible marriage. Carter rounds up the inhabitants to fight on his side and saves the day and, of course, falls in love with the princess of Helium and ends up marrying her to become John Carter of Mars.

This film shares many similarities with Avatar through the foreign world and war between inhabitants as well as its americentric views on the world. It offers action and adventure but the story seems to lack a certain depth.

The film was released in many cinemas across the UK in imax. Imax for those of you that don’t know, is a more immersive movie experience. Two projectors are used meaning the image is clearer and larger and the surround sound is phenomenal. John Carter definitely looked fantastic in imax and made the film worth seeing.

Overall this sci-fi action adventure offers an enjoyable experience for the family with a story that transcends time, space and encounters a lot of action, despites its predictability.

Moments of Impact: an exploration of memory and embodiment in The Vow

Vows are sentimental statements that are spoken with love and kept unbroken. When Leo (Channing Tatum) vows to Paige (Rachel McAdams), on their wedding day, that no matter how far apart they are he will always find a way to get back to her, the audience can expect a truly heart-felt performance as the film will, without a doubt, bring them to tears.

Leo and Paige find themselves falling in love and creating a life together in the city. However, an unfortunate car accident leaves Paige with no recollection of Leo. All Paige remembers is her life up until she is at college and engaged to Jeremy (Scott Speedman), which is an unfortunate development for Leo. Leo then has the difficult task of having to let Paige go, to the extent where he even divorces her, so that she is able to find herself once again and make her way back to him. This tragic love story is incredibly touching and raises some philosophical questions about what makes us the people that we are.

Throughout the film Leo’s voice is used as a voiceover where he explains his theory on what makes us who we are. He suggests that life is made up of moments of impact and these moments make up our memory and the people we become. Therefore, when Paige loses her memory of these moments of impact she regresses back to who she was until she is able to create new moments of impact which lead her in the same direction, but not necessarily to the same future. This raises questions of embodiment, such as; is Paige still Paige when she loses her memory? Who is she if she is not Paige? Is it our memories that make us the people who we are?

Henri Bergson, a famous philosopher, has written a lot about time, space and memory and he suggests that time is, in fact, durée. Durée is considered to be a conscious experience of time as both passing and continuing. It is indivisible and, therefore, has both the pressure of the past pushing onto the present and the vital impulse, élan vital (life/spirit), pulling us toward the open future. Therefore, the present sits between a coextensive virtual past and an open future which means that the past follows us at every instant and we are continually living in a present that is just about to join it. Bergson, therefore, believes that we are continually creating ourselves, where each moment modifies our personality and within each moment we assume this new identity.

These moments, in which our personality is modified and we assume a new identity, could be said to be these moments of impact that Leo mentions. For Paige, the moment of impact in the car accident, that gave her a head injury that would cause her to lose her memory, did modify her personality, to the extent in which she assumed an earlier identity of herself. This regression for Paige foregrounds to the audience that the past is always leaning over the present, but also, as Deleuze a well-known philosopher suggests, that you are internal to time as you are surrounded by it. Paige is in the past at the same moment in which she is in the present, she is internal to time. The flashbacks used throughout the film to show how Leo and Paige’s relationship developed portray Bergson’s theory of how the past is forever behind us, coexisting with our present that is just about to join it and pressing against the portals of consciousness. It is due to durée, as a continuing passing, that Paige is able, through new moments of impact, to modify her personality and create herself in much the same way as she did before, however this time with more understanding. Thus, by the end of the film Paige is not the same Paige that she was at the beginning of the film as she has created new memories and a new personality through her new moments of impact. Therefore, the question can be asked; who is she if she does not have the same memories as Paige once did?

Bergson believes that the very basis of our conscious existence is our memory, as we pluck out of duration those moments of interest and forget all the rest. Perhaps what the film is demonstrating through Paige’s memory loss is not the fact that her identity changes but perhaps the fact that we as humans are continually creating ourselves with our past pushing onto the present, but that the future that we are continually being pulled towards, is open. Therefore, we can be anything we would like to be, despite our past. Perhaps it is not our memories that necessary define the people that we are, but, instead, it is the choices that we make that determine our future, as Paige makes the same choices despite not having the same memories.

The human existence is a delicate one indeed.