newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Nothing whitens like Hollywood!

Like most of her neighbors in the coal patch of post-Apocalyptic America, Katniss Everdeen is described in Suzanne Collins "The Hunger Games" as having straight black hair, olive skin and gray eyes, as well as being small-average in stature.

So who better to play the mixed-race heroine then a statuesque 5'-8" blue-eyed blonde?

Fortunately for racial revisionists everywhere, the talented Jennifer Lawrence is the blonde in question, seen in brown hair in the smallest of nods to the literary Katniss. It's a role that Lawrence essentially has played before to great acclaim, as the hardscrabble teen supporting her family while searching the Ozarks for her missing father in "Winter's Bone."

Lawrence is more than up to the task of bringing to life a brave, resourceful — if not entirely likable — heroine in the dystopic setting of teens battling to the death for civic pride, or at least decent rations.

As the story opens, Katniss Everdeen's father in long-gone, blown to smithereens in a mine explosion. She's left a-huntin' and a-trappin' and a-fishin' with her not-quite boyfriend Gale to support her remaining family: her grief-stricken mother and her beloved 12-year-old sister Prim (Willow Shields).

In a sense, their entire world has also been blown to smithereens. Katniss and her family and few thousand others live in the Seam, a coal patch in the former Appalachia somewhere in the environs of West Virginia or western Pennsylvania. (The movie was shot in North Carolina.) Their District 12 is one of the scattered functioning communities of a North America that has been drowned by the rising tides and heat waves of environmental catastrophe.

But all that still hasn't stopped the coal mining, so our current energy policies are still paying off.

Organized into 13 districts, these surviving are as are under the repressive thumb of an obscenely wealthy capital located somewhere in the Rockies beyond Denver. About 75 years before the story begins, the capital affirmed its supremacy by violently putting down a rebellion.

The particulars are glossed over in the movie, but in this novel, the first of a trilogy, we're told that the rebel center, District 13, got blown to smithereens by the capital's bombs. (The district locations are not identified, but with an underground city center and graphite mines, we're looking at you for 13, Montréal et environs.)

So Collins thoughtfully provided both left and right with their chosen nightmares: global warming destroys the continent, and the Gummint gets even more evil.

Much of that is glossed over in the movie, but the evil manifests itself in the Hunger Games. Every year, the remaining districts must each send two "tributes," a boy and a girl between 12 and 18, to the capital to compete in a winner-take-all bit of reality TV. Think "Survivor" in an engineered wilderness, but played along the lines of the decapitation elimination among immortals in "Highlander." There can be only one.

The winner gets fame, relative fortune and a slight uptick for the economy of their native community. The other 23 get their corpses removed by hovercraft after being shot, stabbed, poisoned, blowed up or ripped to shreds by the capital's mutant animals and insects, all for the entertainment of viewers at home.