The trailer for the upcoming film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian teeny-bopper epic The Hunger Games features lots of trees. Oh, and a girl with a bow, but mostly trees.
The Hunger Games, the first installment in Collin’s Hunger Games Trilogy, is a surprisingly hard-hitting science fiction thriller, in which a fascist post-apocalyptic government makes children murder each other on live television for the amusement of adults everywhere. It’s essentially Battle Royale with a little bit more romance, class warfare and some keen observations on the nature of celebrity.
In this new trailer, we get our first glimpse of young actress Jennifer Lawrence as grumpy heroine Katniss Everdeen, and there’s a little bit of narration from a character I assume is baker-cum-hero Peeta, as played by Josh Hutcherson Gale, played by Liam Hemsworth. We also, as you may have guessed, get to see a lot of trees.
While I haven’t seen enough of Lawrence or Hutcherson’s work to judge how they’ll fare playing the books’, occasionally quite complex, protagonists, the rest of the film’s casting seems perfect. Woody Harrelson is making an appearance as former games-winner and traumatized drunk, Haymitch Abernathy. Donald Sutherland will be playing the unnerving President Snow and someone – some beautiful person – cast Lenny Kravitz as Cinna, Katniss’ sexually ambiguous fashion stylist and confidant.
While I would have liked to have seen some footage that does’t involve greenery, particularly I was hoping to see Katniss’ “Girl On fire” outfit, which I suspect will be particularly difficult for the costume department, the trailer has inspired in a me a kind of quiet optimism I’m not used to.. As long as the film doesn’t scrimp on the book’s brutal, but effective, servings of violence, then this might just work.
The Hunger Games is being directed by Gary Ross and is tentatively scheduled to hit theaters on March 23rd of next year.
