Movie Review: The Hunger Games (2012)

Director: Gary Ross

The Hunger Games follows Katniss Everdeen, a talented and courageous archer living in District 12, one of the poorest regions of the dystopian nation of Panem. Each year, the Capitol forces children from the districts to participate in the Hunger Games, a televised fight to the death designed to maintain control and intimidate the population. When Katniss volunteers to take her younger sister’s place, she faces deadly challenges, alliances, and moral dilemmas while confronting the stark inequalities between the Capitol and the struggling districts. Her bravery and defiance make her a symbol of hope and resistance against systemic oppression and social injustice.

The film is a vivid representation of how faulty urbanism and inequality can impact the quality of life of the masses. The Capitol, inhabited by the privileged class, is a hypertechnologized wonderland full of luxury. ‘The Shimmer’ is a force that magically preserves the ‘unreal’ human civilization, with its grand skyscrapers and hedonistic mansions by the lake. It’s a land of power for the few, but at what cost? The Capitol is characterized by infrastructure development that extracts natural resources, destroys the environment, and leads to a life of starvation for the other districts, where most inhabitants are forced to live as cheap labor.

The districts, by contrast, are rural, resource-depleted, and environmentally scarred places where populations struggle to meet basic needs such as food, clean water, and shelter. This contrast highlights the impact of design and resource allocation on human survival and quality of life. The extent of the elites’ dominance over infrastructure, technology, and resource endowments enables them to remain largely shielded from the ecological and social consequences of their actions, with environmental pollution, depletion, and collapse left for the masses to pay.

The Hunger Games, by making this hyperinequality visible, is a work of criticism of the destructiveness of “unsustainable urbanization” and the moral cost of placing private profit and comfort above planetary health and human welfare. It reinforces the message that a few people benefiting from a high quality of life at the expense of nature and society implies social unrest, moral decline, as well as ecological ruin.

The movie clearly tells viewers that sustainable development can't be only about building technology and highrise cities, but instead needs to be about protecting the masses and their environment's health and providing an equal distribution of resources for all; otherwise, chaos will persist and nobody can live with peace.