The Tone of the Hunger Games
Originally Written by Anthony Fertino
I do not believe it is helping the progress of the film, as the science fiction extravaganza with piercing emotional sacrifice and hardship that it is in the literature medium, by promoting Taylor Swift as the first song on the soundtrack. No one will take this film seriously so long as she continues to maintain attention. No disrespect to fans of the singer—she simply does not fit in this series.
That is, her music does not. A lyricist is no less than a poetic wordsmith for singers, and ultimately what is sung may actually be relevant to the story. But Swift’s style is completely contradictory to the book. The tone of the film at some point or other, when playing her music, will become overly dramatic and the impact will be severely toned down.
If we fans are to be pleased, the studios will have to desist altogether shoving the Hunger Games down people’s throats as something that actually needs to be marketed. This film does not need popular to sell, and its romance does not need to be oversimplified into Michael Bay proportions.
We understand there are two men in our main character’s life, and that the casted actors are as Twilight as possible, so hopefully they’ll end this reign of promoting to as many teenage girls as possible. This story is a generally accessible science fiction film which presents a fully plausible totalitarian government.
Glamour is the biggest mistake our filmmakers can ultimately fall to for us fans to be displeased entirely. This is not a glamorous story. Let’s say that Twilight is Pearl Harbor, as The Hunger Games is Saving Private Ryan.
While Bay’s film in the former duo is vastly superior to Twilight in every way, the film still managed to gloss everything about war into a plastic, old-time Hollywood style story. Saving Private Ryan shows us how ugly war is. Violence looks attractive in the former, while in the latter, it is bloody and merciless and rugged.
Luckily, IMDb has listed James Newton Howard as composer of the original music for the film. This is absolute, best-case scenario. The man composed King Kong, which established his capacity to balance the sentimental with the exciting. And for anyone who thought the film overall was boring, one look back at the Tyrannosaurus sequence will prove Howard’s ability to unhinge when he wants to into pure visceral ferocity.
That is what the Hunger Games should be. That is what The Hunger Games is.
