Hunger Games and its political message.

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Aspiring Mogul

According to the Hollywood Reporter,

Donald Sutherland recently told the Guardian that he hopes his newest film, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, will “stir up a revolution,” which to him means that young people will be encouraged to agitate for left-wing causes like more food stamps, solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, the closure of Guantanamo and opposition to energy drilling and drone strikes.
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But the Tea Party is using the movie as a cautionary tale against excessive government power.

I just saw the movie, and, while I can see it as a tale of excessive government power, it can also be seen as a tale of ever-greater income inequality generated by the free markets, as well as a tale of Republican militarism gone mad. So, in the end, a movie - like a story, is what you make of it.
 
I was just wondering about this movie! It's like most of the fans of the saga don't understand the deep and strong social critic that the movie has, but for me is still super weird that such a political movie got to be so commercial!
 
^As long as the political message isn't given major focus to come across as preaching to the audience then the film containing those messages will have a chance to become commercial.

Stanley Kubrick was a filmmaker who wanted to convey certain messages to the audience and because of the nature of those messages he had to find a way to make them part of the background. To not draw too much attention to it. Essentially what you end up with is a hidden narrative that those who really see between the lines can detect and understand. There's some things that a studio would nix if they saw it in a film, so therefore some filmmakers hide it under commercial aspects.

It's why some filmmakers choose to do commercial films so that they can earn money to fund more personal projects. Christopher Nolan only did the Batman movies so he could do projects like The Prestige, Inception and Interstellar. He still put a lot of genuine hard work and effort into the Batman films, he didn't treat them as meaningless but doing them also gave him more leverage and clout for other projects.

In the case of The Hunger Games:

If you're going to do a movie that is about people in poverty or other dire circumstances being forced to take part in something that promotes killing you want that part of the film to be shown but if too much focus is made about that then it starts to become a preaching film, which hurts it's commercial potential.

At first Katniss is reluctant to become a killer. She has morals that she doesn't want to destroy. However she feels like she has to act when her sister is chosen. She doesn't want her sister to become a killer so she sacrifices her own morals and her humanity to save her sister.

Eventually because of the situation she is faced with she becomes hardened and at the same time she becomes a popular contestant so she gets caught up in the glitz that this brings as well as the fame.

The real underlying message the film is conveying, in my opinion is that the poor are expendable so if you need people for war force those people into service because if you don't then all the important citizens will be sacrificed which isn't suitable. Humanity's weakness is compassion so force someone to eliminate that compassion by forcing them into a situation where they must have no compassion for if they do they won't survive.

But if that message was placed front and center it would be a preachy film. Even the way I have worded it comes across as preachy.

So the Hunger Games is commercial because the political aspects are overpowered by the action aspect. The surface narrative is of a woman being faced with her own mortality and if she is to survive she must push herself to the limits and kill or be killed.

The underlying narrative is about a woman who lives in poverty sacrificing her own life which is viewed as expendable by the government anyway.
 
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