I wasn’t going to write about The Hunger Games movie – I’m a huge fan of the books and had no advance screening, so I just went to the cinema with everyone else on opening night as a consumer. But I have to share my reaction to concern expressed about The Hunger Games‘ violence which I’ve read in the days following the movie’s release, writes Phil Fox Rose in Busted Halo.
I was certainly very interested to see how they makers of the movie would deal with translating the book’s extreme brutality against and among children into a movie that children could watch. I am surprised they went as far as they did and think they came very close to the edge. There’s lots of blood, and a few of the children are killed onscreen — but the violence is never gratuitous.
Much of the criticism is from people reacting without bothering to understand, but Bo Sanders’ interesting post in Homebrewed Christianity caught my eye. Essentially, Bo loved the movie, but expresses some concerns raised by the fact that when he saw the movie there was cheering when a “good” character killed a “bad” character.
It’s a thoughtful post and the comment thread is heady and interesting. Perhaps if anyone had cheered at the violence when I saw it, I’d have had the same reaction — as I did last year when I wrote about my repulsion at the celebrations over Ben Laden’s death — but I find nothing to criticise in The Hunger Games‘ use of violence.
A few days later I watched a religious war movie that glorified violence. It held up violence done in the name of religion, honour and freedom as something praiseworthy; it nearly said that this killing was good. That is troubling.
In The Hunger Games, on the other hand, we see some of the killers as disturbingly amoral, some as products of their conditioning, and in the few cases where violence is performed by one of the “good” people, it is sad and disturbing.
FULL STORY The Hunger Games - Is its violence appropriate? (Busted Halo)
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http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/priest-calls-hunger-games-movie-dangerously-prophetic/