If you go down to the woods this weekend, you're sure of a big surprise. The latest teen movie sensation, The Hunger Games, is much better than the Twilight clone Hollywood had been threatening. Everybody breathe a sigh of relief.
Gary Ross's film has been compared to Stephenie Meyer's insipid vampire saga because it's once again based on a bestselling young adult novel and has emerged from the same studio, Lionsgate, which owns the rights to the earlier series through its Summit subsidiary. But if producers were hunting for a similar genre-movie-meets-teen-romance formula, they have ended up with something rather spikier. Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel wears its dystopian satire lightly: there are far too few details of the future society inhabited by Katniss Everdeen and her fellow "tributes" for the book to be seen as an Orwellian narrative. Yet Jennifer Lawrence's hearty heroine certainly has the drop on Twilight's Bella Swan, whose contentment to sit mopey-eyed on the sidelines while hunky Team Edward and Team Jacob sort out all the important stuff makes her a pretty appalling role model for young women. By contrast, Katniss is her family's breadwinner, an assured hunter whose survival skills make her the ideal contestant for the staged reality TV kiddie bloodbath that is the Hunger Games.
Any romance in the movie is not of the wide-eyed Just 17 variety, but rather more in step with the calculated passion often adopted by desperate Big Brother contestants who know it is their best chance of avoiding eviction. And the violence, while not explicit, is a constant and genuine threat carried out by contestants who resemble real people rather than attractive models. The Hunger Games may be a Fisher Price version of the movies and novels it plunders so mercilessly, but its more jagged angles will still give you a nasty cut.
It's clearly no coincidence that on the same day as the film makes its UK and US debut in cinemas, the debut teaser trailer for The Host has arrived on the web. Based on the 2008 science fiction novel by Meyer about a future in which mankind is threatened by the arrival of an alien race of parasitic "Souls" who take over human bodies, the big-screen adaptation will feature Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan in the lead role, and is directed by Gattaca's often-excellent Andrew Niccol. Are the film-makers hinting to Twilight fans that the true scion of Meyer's saga has yet to emerge blinking into the sunlight? Of course they are.
Niccol's underrated In Time last year pulled off the neat trick of couching super-seditious allegory in the lissom form of a mainstream Bonnie & Clyde-style futuristic thriller. Unfortunately, the New Zealand film-maker did such a good job of mimicking Hollywood action tropes that few people seemed to notice the insurrectionary undercurrent. The Host doesn't, at first glance, look quite so pugnacious, and there are worrying hints of the old Meyer predilection for rather colourless female leads.
The trailer itself doesn't tell us all that much, simply showing that much of humanity has been taken over by the Souls, whose parasitic presence is conveniently signalled by silvery-blue rings around the pupils (at least they don't glitter hunkily in the sunlight). In a riff on Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, the alien invasion has immediately halted all wars, famine, hunger and torment, though this appears to be largely because it's difficult to launch plans for the Fourth Reich when you're a mindless husk being controlled by something from another planet.
A little further research tells us that Ronan is due to play The Wanderer, a Soul who has inhabited a number of previous bodies on a variety of planets, but has recently moved into a sought-after abode named Melanie "Mel" Stryder. Her host retains some semblance of self-awareness and is able to communicate with her invader. They become rather like sisters, but inconveniently wind up fancying different members of the rag-tag band of rebels with whom they come into contact. A sort of Me, Myself, Team Edward and Team Jacob, then. Just reading the synopsis set off alarm bells here: is the "new Twilight" still out there after all?
