Every year a boy and a girl ages 12 to 18 are chosen from each Panem district to compete in the gladiatorial games of the title, a fight that owes something to that ancient Roman blood sport and something else to the Greek myth of the Minotaur, the part man, part bull that devoured Athenian youths given in tribute. Katniss lives in District 12 of Panem - as in panem et circenses, Latin for bread and circuses - a totalitarian state that has risen from the postwar ashes of North America. Collins and Billy Ray hews dutifully close to its source material, at least in wide strokes. For others the image of a girl like Katniss taking up so much screen space with so few smiles may be enough to keep faith. Ross is onboard to direct the follow-up, Catching Fire.) For some fans of the three novels, the screen version will inevitably be disappointing, especially for those keeping inventory of the details, characters, grim thoughts and cynicism that have gone missing. A brilliant, possibly historic creation - stripped of sentimentality and psychosexual ornamentation, armed with Diana’s bow and a ferocious will - Katniss is a new female warrior, and she keeps you watching even while you’re hoping for something better the next time around. Ross is too nice a guy for a hard case like Katniss. Ross often seems comfortable with, perhaps because of disposition, inclination or some behind-the-scenes executive mandate.
Katniss, who for years has bagged game to keep her family from starving, was created for rough stuff - for beating the odds and the state, for hunting squirrel and people both - far rougher than Mr. Ross, the director of the genial entertainments Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, and whose script credits include Big, has a way of smoothing even modestly irregular edges. When she runs through that forest, and even when she falls, there’s something of the American frontiersman in her, as if she were Natty Bumppo reborn and resexed.įor as long as this brief scene lasts, it seems possible that Gary Ross, the unlikely and at times frustratingly ill-matched director for this brutal, unnerving story, has caught the heart-skipping pulse of Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans if not that film’s ravishing technique and propulsive energy. Katniss, the lethally tough linchpin from Suzanne Collins’s trilogy and now a rather less imposing film heroine, is a teenage survivalist in a postapocalyptic take on a familiar American myth. There’s a short anxious scene in the new film The Hunger Games when its 16-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), races through a deep, dark forest falls down a hill and rolls and rolls, only to rise up and thrust herself again into the unknown.
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