Why I Hate The Hunger Games
Sometimes I get informed of a really good foreign film before a lot of my friends or peers hear about it. I just have connections in odd places. One such film was Battle Royale. In short once a year a class is selected to go into a secluded area and for 3 days they fight it out. The winner is the final survivor. Given such a large cast, it’s rather easy to make connections with some of the children, and even those who don’t get much screen time it’s horrifying to see them die.
If you know where I’m going with this, then your already screaming that there’s a million differences between Hunger Games and Battle Royale. Fuck you and let me make my point. My point isn’t so much that the two films/books (BR started as a book) have surprisingly similar themes, but the general laziness it takes to basically steal something foreign and re-write it. When I saw Battle Royale my first thought wasn’t “This is a great movie, how can I get rich re-writing it?” but was instead to tell friends and people I know about it and how they were missing out.
I think that’s the biggest problem, is that too many people just want to cash in on someone else good idea. Now one of my favorite movies, The Departed, is a remake of a Japaneses film “Internal Affairs”. But at the very least they admit that it is a remake. Sure, maybe it was a cash-in on a popular movie in a way, but at least it was done with one of the best directors and best casts you could get. There aren’t too many directors in the world better then Scorsese at the very least.
The anger is just that any of us could have taken Battle Royale, turned it into a poorly written “young adult” book and we would be millionaires today. But a majority of us wouldn’t think like that. Most of us would look at Battle Royale, say “That was an excellent movie” and move on. People like Suzanne Collins are among the worst in the world. They find something old, slap a new coat of paint on it and cash in. The amazing thing is that this crap gets made, when there are so many other possible great movies/books to be made out there. Yet because these types of books are most likely to make a profit, they are made first.
