With The Hunger Games, the decade old tradition of Hollywood continues, taking it all (from the first frame to the last) from an engrossingly well made Japanese Thriller called "BATTLE ROYALE 2" released in 2003. Did they take the rights of the Japanese thriller 'BATTLE ROYALE 2' or just copied it shamelessly as per modern Hollywood's tradition?
In short, the director and his writer take 90% ingredients for their over-cooked script from the Japanese Film. Then they add a love-sex angle to it as a mandatory clause of Twilightesque Film-making technique. To make it more spicier, they bring in some eunuch characters into the narration with the get-up earlier used in their own films. And further, sprinkling it with a few emotional sequences about some broken families, they are ready with their latest flick The Hunger Games, taking advantage of the brand name.
As I have realised, many of my reader friends here would like to say that, "We don't really care if it's a copy or not, so cut out the allegation crap and just let us know whether the movie is good or bad and that's it." In answer to that I would only like to say that The Hunger Games is an Open Creative Theft made by the Collis camp in this current age of world-wide- web. Now, a theft remains a theft, whether done carelessly or with utmost care and devotion. Even if it happens to be a too good movie (which fortunately it isn't), still it remains a Shameless Robbery of any other person's creative work and nothing else. And I am simply not interested in writing a detailed review of a copied movie.
However, for all my friendly readers, who are willing to know more about Cinema in details, I would like to present this movie as a fine lesson in learning few important things about Hollywood Film-making style.
1. Hollywood film-maker's biggest problem is that we still are not sure of what genre we are dealing in while making a film. The current The Hunger Games copies a fast paced cruel bloody Japanese thriller "BATTLE ROYALE" , it's a Bloody Suspense Thriller and it remains a bloody suspense thriller throughout.
But The Hunger Games not even remains a thriller in its more than 2 hours of duration. There is an added track in it of a beautiful model girl who is in love with the hero as Love essentially has to be there like sugar or salt in a dish. There are many unwanted eunuchs and unmoving stories of broken families inserted into it which were not required at all. The soundtrack has surprisingly all love songs in a SCIFI THRILLER movie like a variety served on the dinner table by its makers.
2. Secondly in this new age of fresh creative minds, we still follow double standards in showing the characters of our male and female leads. Now in the original flick the lead character or the hero is not a female. But in our Tweenie version the hero becomes a strong female character. So the writers give a certain amount of disrespect to the very source they are copying from directly.
But on the other hand The Hunger Games has a sexy-model beefcake characters played by eunuchs, who simply have no definite role in the movie but is added only to be exploited as a male butt rump.
That's the double standard mind-set Hollywood actually works in.
3. Thirdly after watching both the movies, you will have a clear idea of what it means by the term "Added Sub Plots" which in most of the cases ruin the real essence of a film. In this case too, where the original keeps walking on a single track and never gets distracted from its basic storyline of BATTLE ROYALE, its USA copy keeps wandering between its various added subplots which could have been easily avoided. Frankly speaking we can't even stick to a basic storyline even when its all copied from another brilliant source.
4. Lastly and more importantly, if you even copy the idea for the Poster of your film along with its script then I wonder what the whole team actually may have done as far as creativity is concerned in this project. Here the makers of The Hunger Games not only copy their whole film from the Japanese Original scene to scene, but they also copy their posters. Now that's really a great amount of research done by the team.
Summing up, with The Hunger Games, the Gary Ross camp continues to try for their next box office success in American Cinema by taking the credit of all the hard work done by someone else residing in a different part of the globe far away……and they have really mastered this shameful act of "Art of Inspiration" by now. (However, I would love to be surprised with the impossible news that they actually did buy the rights this time.)
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