I've given 5-star ratings to every "Hunger Games" novel, and I tell you...
...I am plum out of desire to see the new movie.
Let me spare you the complete backstory between me and Suzanne Collins’ literary masterpiece series The Hunger Games. Short version, it’s a series I will read many times in my life. Not many books make that list.
A few years ago my wife joined me on the podcast to cover all four books after we had both read the new one. The episode runs for nearly two hours but it’s one of my best. I should have her on more often. (Spotify link here.)
When the movies started coming along in 2012 I was excited and wanted them to succeed. The first one was fine, though its low budget showed, and it adapted almost everything in the first half of the book only to rush the latter half.
Its success led to a very strong second installment. Then the studio got caught up in the craze of splitting the third story to make more money, and the last two movies suffered for it. At that point people were understandably ready for it to be over. Me, I’ll always love the books, the end.
Then in 2019 it was revealed that Collins had written a prequel. Very little was known about it, other than it was based on the 10th Hunger Games. I almost expected it to focus on the youth of Mags from book 2, but no, it turned out it was an origin story for Coriolanus Snow, the future president of Panem. (Played by Donald Sutherland in the movies.)
Despite the book being a tragedy, it was a rare bright spot for me in 2020. Beautiful, meaningful literature only comes along every so often. This one was a cautionary tale about choosing power over love. No excuses were made for Snow, no victimhood narrative, no “oh well he thought he was the good guy and people were mean to him.”
Unequivocally, he was a bad man who did bad things because he was proud and loved himself more than anyone else. I applauded Collins for being plain about this.
I’ve since re-read TBOSAS in Spanish (I own the entire series in both languages) and yeah, it’s still amazing. You might assume, then, that I would be the target audience for the forthcoming movie adaptation.
Reader, I am apparently not. The trailer has landed, and lo, I am unimpressed.
First things first, let me just say…good night above, this cast sucks. Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow is a guy who is so broke he can only afford one facial expression, known in the industry as “Slim Shady Holding In A Fart On A First Date.”
This is from part 3 of the story, where he’s a peacekeeper in District 12. The military haircut makes sense at least, but even in parts 1 and 2 the costume director was like “Hey bro, let’s lean HARD AF into pseudo-Aryan imagery, I just scalped a purebred Pomeranian for your wig, here we go.”
That photo brings me nicely to an even bigger casting problem, which is Rachel Zegler in…well, anything, but specifically, this movie. She mugs way too hard for the camera, and she doesn’t look like Lucy Gray Baird. But hey, they didn’t stop her from being cast as…oh holy crap…yes, she’s Snow White in an upcoming Disney flick, and you’d better love it, you absolute racist. By-the-by, Zegler is a she AND a her, because she thinks you’re not capable of recognizing she’s female.
That brings us to the next casting problem, Peter Dinklage as Casca Highbottom. Dinklage is a fine actor, but the character is supposed to be given to decadence and have an imposing presence over Coriolanus. This is 2020s diversity stunt casting, ironically coming on the heels of him complaining about there being dwarves that are called dwarves in an adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
I don’t really have any beef with Viola Davis as Dr. Gaul. Whether she matches the physical description of the character, I can’t remember; Dr. Gaul is an insane scientist who likes to hurt people, I suppose as long as they get that component of her right, the rest doesn’t matter.
The casting is directly responsible for my next beef with the trailer, and that’s that the acting looks pretty terrible, especially from the leads. None of the lines feel like they come from the text, it’s just generic try-hard protagonist stuff, pushed through a colander that’s too tight to let it sift.
It’s all just so cringey. Look, I’m not going to belabor the point, you guys can watch the trailer for yourself…I think the ship has sailed on the film adaptations for this world. They’re never really going to touch the greatness of the books themselves. They’re eye candy, sure. And hopefully they’ll make people want to read the book.
But if I’m walking into this thing cold, and this trailer is supposed to entice me, well, I can’t imagine it working. And that’s coming from a guy who proposed to his wife by talking about the third book in the series.
Anyway, get back to work.