The basis for The Hunger Games is just a contrivance. It is said that the games referred to in the title, in which two teenagers from each of the Twelve Districts of Panem are forced to fight one another to the death, are punishment for a rebellion that took place seventy-four years earlier. Seventy-four years? Reconstruction only lasted about ten years after the Civil War. And whom would the Capital be punishing? Most of the people who rebelled would have long since died, and most of the people being punished would not even have been born when the rebellion took place.

The squalor of the districts people live in looks like something from the Great Depression. But when the Hunger Games begin, we find that technology has developed to the point that the people monitoring the games can cause three cats to materialize by pressing a button. Well, if they can do that, why not materialize a bunch of cows for the starving people in the districts to eat? Oh yeah, I forgot. They are still being punished for stuff they didn’t do.

We expect all movies to be politically correct to some degree, but when the political correctness is too obvious, you just have to groan. In particular, all the evil people in this movie are white; all the people who are not white are good. Oh brother!