Why I Skipped the Hunger Games

The title should also be appended "And Why I Probably Shouldn't Have" but whatever. No movie this week, so I'll tell you about why I didn't go to see one of the biggest movies this year (it's got the second biggest opening weekend this year, and will probably be in the top five grossing movies in 2012, when all is said and done).

I haven't read The Hunger Games (or any of the sequels). I got a page or two into the first one, but found it to be ... not good. That's unusual for me, because I usually brag about having a higher tolerance for crap than other people, but I guess my literary standard is a bit more uppity than I thought. That's not to say I don't love pulp, but it has to be well-written pulp. Take Star Wars, for instance. Timothy Zahn knows how to write a book, and can rock the GFFA like none other, so I really like reading his stuff. But it was only my determined love of all things Star Wars that propelled me through Kevin J Anderson's stuff. I imagine that at 15 years of age, the Jedi Academy trilogy would be riveting, but right now, it's rather trite.

So I passed on The Hunger Games because I didn't like the writing, but also because I thought the basic plot had been done before. And I say this with all possible respect, but a tournament to the death is has been used more than the village bicycle, if you catch my drift. There are actually two plots here, or more accurately, one wider plot and a narrower one that fits into it.

The first one is the basic tournement, usually with the losers being killed. Examples coming to mind are Mortal Kombat (the losers forfeit the souls), Battle Royale (which I haven't seen), Lionheart (ditto), Bloodsport (again, not seen), and The Condemned (this time, with prisoners. You can make them do anything if you promise freedom).

The narrower plot takes the above and sets it slightly in the future, and airs it on TV. It seems like the one thing movies can agree on is that in the future, we'll have no taste. Not that we have any now (reality TV comes to mind, as does Work It, which was thankfully cancelled), but I'd like to think we'd draw the line at actual death being aired. But then I read an article on Cracked that reminded me hangings used to be a pretty big show back in the late 1800's (before we decided they weren't rated E for Everyone), and even farther back, stoning was decent entertainment. So we definitely have the historical background to enjoy death, but only if the people deserve it (that's why it's killing, and not murder). It's not entirely unjustified that people in the future would watch death on TV. Examples include The Running Man, Death Race, and Rollerball.

So I jumped to the conclusion that because The Hunger Games had a similar plot to many other works of fiction, it must not be good, or that I didn't need to see it because I've seen it before, so to speak. And that's simply not the case.

Take Harry Potter. A young man lives with his Aunt and Uncle, discovers he has magical powers, and grows up to save the world while his best friends fall in love. Oh yes, and his cool old mentor wizard dies at the hands of one of his former students. J.K Rowling may as well have called him Harry Skywalker.

Or how about a young man's parents are killed, so he lives with others. He discovers he has awesome powers, and so he grows up to save the world while falling in love. Meet Harry Kent. A young man's parents are killed, so he lives with his aunt and uncle, has trouble at school, discovers he has awesome powers, grows up to save the world while falling in love? It's one journalism job away from Harry Parker.

They all follow the same basic plot, which is explicitly laid out in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's what happened when Joseph Campbell looked at a whole bunch of different stories and picked out the familiar elements, which got called The Hero's Journey. You can read way more about it in the link. It created a template (or distilled a template out of thousands of stories) that George Lucas used when writing Star Wars, which is why so many things can get compared to it.

All of which to say that I shouldn't look down on The Hunger Games because it sort of mixes Mortal Kombat with Death Race (and some 1984 mixed in). I doubt I'll have the chance to see it in theatre, so I may have to get the DVD. Evan vouched for it, so there's a good chance that it's actually decent. But don't ask me to read the books.