The Hunger Games

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

The Hunger Games

I only saw the movie recently and I was really impressed but at the same time slightly disturbed.

Here’s the trailer for Hunger Games in case you haven’t seen it:

The setting is a post-apocalyptic North America where selected teenagers are forced into a brutal competition which is televised for the masses.

What Struck Me About The Hunger Games

As I watched the hunger games, I sat wacthing it objectively as an action movie with young people but then as it went on it became darker and darker, until I realised I was watching young people murder each other.

This sparked a number of thoughts in my mind.

Firstly, my thought was that this happens everyday in real life but in a different context. Young people who join gangs murder each other over drugs, money and material possessions.

Then I started to think that this is a disturbing reflection of where we could be heading as a society.

In a sense, we watch a movie like this and think, this is not real and it never could be. But it was only a few centuries ago that the Roman colosseum was open for business, where real people were thrown into the arena and brutally murdered, fed to lions and fought to a bloody death while thousands of people watched in awe and excitement.

This was a sordid part of our human history and it shows what we are capable of and how low we can stoop.

Many would argue that humans were more primative then and that we have progressed so far from those days….

But have we?

In many countries, people are still tortured in prison and have brutal things done to them if they are accused of crimes. People are still unjustly killed because of religious differences and racial judgements. Okay, it may not be entertainment any more but who’s to say that it won’t become so again?

In the west, we are a lot more “civilised” though. No we don’t do those things any more. Instead we watch reality shows like X-Factor, Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, The Only Way Is Essex and other such items where people are thrown into modern day arenas and given challenges that cater to the public’s every whim.

Even celebrity culture has turned normal people who are entertainers into these figures that the general public feel can be scrutinised almost as if they are not real people but fictional characters.

My concern is how long will it be before we start becoming more and more blood thirsty to the point that we stop seeing the people in reality shows as being real and start to want to see them put through more vigorous challenges until the point where we are only entertained if blood is spilled?

Some would argue that we would never get there but having looked at our history and seeing what still goes on around the world and looking at our nature as humans, I am not convinced.

The Hunger Games is definitely a great piece of fiction but I am convinced that the writer was exploring and questioning the problems of the human condition and the dangers of where we could end up if we are not careful.