Why the Hunger Games Fails

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is almost certainly one of the worst films ever made (no hyperbole intended). I patiently explain why, and suggest improvements

The cast of The Hunger Games, embarrassed about their crimes against cinema, listen to my suggestions attentively

A vast American woodland unfolds, bringing tidings of big-budget drama. Jennifer Lawrence is out hunting, and it's not long before she's shooting people with arrows and breaking boy's hearts left, right and centre (well, she is Jennifer Lawrence). As one ponders incredulously how anyone thought it would be a good idea to encourage impressionable young girls to adopt the solipsistic Katniss as a role model, the credits roll on an unconvincing cliff hanger. Hours have been wasted on limp social satire (if one can call it that) and gratuitous violence. I leave the cinema dissatisfied, annoyed that my cinematic companions ever thought it wise to subject me to this.
Bizarrely, my foolish friends had the audacity to believe that The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was a good film. Of course they were gravely mistaken, and so it is my solemn duty to instruct humanity on where this poor excuse for cinema is going wrong, and what can be done to stop the rot.

1) Get a better heroine

Jennifer Lawrence sets fire to a caravan. Nobody likes caravans.

Yes, she is Jennifer Lawrence, but unfortunately, Lawrence only shines when she gets proper roles, like in Winter's Bone and The Burning Plain. In The Burning Plain she set fire to some people, and yet still seemed more sympathetic than the cold fish she plays in The Hunger Games. That's mainly because she was allowed a little space to breathe as a character, rather than being flung headlong into unrealistic situations involving killer fog and spinning islands. Maybe I can't expect too much from teenage fiction heroes, Bella Swan and Harry Potter are hardly the most beautifully crafted creations in the world. But if such nauseating franchises are going to occupy so many of our cinema screens, can they at least behave a little like grown up films?
Katniss should be a little more like Tess Durbeyfield or Isabel Archer. Both of these women do unbelievably stupid things, Tess even turns homicidal near the end (not quite to the same extent as Katniss, mercifully). Yet they're likeable; you can empathize with them; they have more than one character trait. Need I continue? Yes, your heroine should make mistakes that may encourage the impassioned reader to want to shout at their paperbacks. But, she must at least feel a little self-doubt over her actions, and develop as a result (i.e. not continuing to shoot people with arrows).Then, perhaps, we may care when Katniss is struck by lightening, instead of hoping for a mortality in order to put an end to the whole sorry affair.

2) A moderately sensible plot wouldn't go amiss

Bernard and Lenina conclude they must sort their wardrobe out before they can save the world

Children killing each other? Really? Why? Aldous Huxley's World Controllers wouldn't even consider such an utter waste of resources, relying on their infinitely more subtle ways of manipulation. Orwell's tyrants recognized that fear, suspicion and constant monitoring is all one needs to keep the people down. With this, there's no need for such irresponsible, reality-TV-show inspired histrionics which, as the film demonstrates, have the opportunity of backfiring spectacularly. And don't you think that the parents would actually become more committed revolutionaries if their children were slain in the name of mass entertainment? The villainous Duke (Ralph Fiennes on top form) could only entrap Keira Knightley's eponymous Duchess with the threat of forbidding her from seeing her children. Once this threat was removed, I imagine she'd be perfectly happy to go skipping off into the sunset with Charles Grey, just as Suzanne Collins's would-be revolutionaries would then have nothing to hold back their efforts to bring down the Government.
Slightly silly plots are often a good thing. Slaughterhouse Five involved time travel and aliens, yet still managed to be a harrowing portrayal of the bombing of Dresden. Virginia Woolf's Orlando is deeply silly; the protagonist changes his/her sex halfway through for no identifiable reason, before living for hundreds of years with no one thinking this the least bit peculiar. How do these two texts get away with it while The -Hunger Games doesn't (apart from by being a lot better)? The difference is Vonnegut, Woolf and Huxley are all to some extent tongue-in-cheek, the reader is well aware that the author is delighting in being ever-so-slightly ridiculous. And yet they all portray a serious message about atrocities, gender and dystopian futures respectively. Orwell does take himself seriously, but then again Nineteen Eighty-Four had the solid grounding of the author's experience of Communist treachery during the Spanish Civil War, making much of the more elaborate aspects of the novel effectively allegorical. Until The Hunger Games stops taking itself so seriously (Harry Potter never seemed to in the earlier days), then perhaps it will have more success in broadcasting its vaguely Marxist message.

3) Get a better soundtrack (better still, turn it into a musical)

The Kaiser Chefs predict a riot

As I grimly braced myself for the ensuing cinematic torture that was The Hunger Games 2, I consoled myself with the fact that at least there'd be some decent songs in it. Coldplay had a solid contribution with the haunting Atlas (although fantastic verses give way to a weak chorus), and Ellie Goulding, Lorde and Of Monsters and Men had all chipped in. Imagine my horror when not one of these songs surfaced in the film itself. Why did these fabulous artists bother writing any of these numbers if no one was going to put them in the film they were singing about? All I got was the opening of Atlas in the credits, and as everybody knows, no one sticks around for the credits.
Baz Luhrman managed to include all of the songs sold as the Gatsby soundtrack into his film, and it clearly benefits from it (again, the point about not taking yourself too seriously stands, something Baz Luhrman can never be accused of). You can see the joyous delight Luhrman takes in cannibalizing pop culture in Moulin Rouge!. Gentlemen in top hats singing Nirvana; Jim Broadbent and Richard Roxburgh's hilarious rendition of Like a Virgin; what's not to love? Indeed, why is The Hunger Games not a musical? Jennifer Lawrence could sing The Winner Takes it All! The evil President Snow could sing "you say you want a revolution, we-ell you know/ We all wanna change the world"! One of the riot police, or whatever they are, could sing "Oooo, watching the people get lairy/ It's not very pretty I tell thee" in an admonishing tone! In fact, lets change the name from the stupidly bland Catching Fire to The Hunger Games: The People Get Lairy.
But if in their wisdom, the makers of The Hunger Games decide not to turn the third installment into an all-singing, all-dancing finale, they should at least take a leaf out of Submarine's and Into the Wild's book and include some atmospheric, but not intrusive, ditties.