The Hunger Games franchise has given us one of the most exciting dystopian stories of the 21st century. So it only seems natural that its social media team would tap into the current dystopian-adjacent feeling many of us have gotten from the current pandemic work-from-home experience. With a little bit of editing mastery, it’s condensed the entire first film in the series down to a Zoom call -- and, not gonna lie, it’s actually way more interesting than your average workday meeting.
The Hunger Games Twitter account shared the short video over the weekend with a cheeky introduction: “Tributes, please remember to unmute yourselves.” Though it’s under a minute long, the 74th Annual Hunger Games Zoom Meeting manages to get the basics down. Take a look at the clever clip below:
It’s been awhile since The Hunger Games took the world by storm, but the basic premise is still pretty easy to remember: a post-apocalyptic tyrannical government has divided the United States into twelve mostly impoverished districts. Every year, each district sends two child tributes to the Capitol, Panem, to battle to the death until only one remains standing. District 12, where Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) live, is the poorest, and they haven’t had a tribute win in years.
In Zoom Meeting form, it goes a little something like this: President Snow (Donald Sutherland) kicks the meeting off by welcoming everyone on the call to the games. A screen then shows all 24 tributes are present and accounted for -- though only for a moment.
Some tributes’ cameras aren’t on to begin with, but those that are show glimpses of them fighting for their lives throughout the games. Every few seconds, cannon fire can be heard, signaling the fact that another tribute has left the meeting - or, you know, died. One by one, in the order they die in The Hunger Games, tributes disappear from view until only Peeta and Katniss remain and are declared the winners.
While the Zoom Meeting format allows for many of the biggest moments from The Hunger Games to be communicated, it’s not a perfect summary of the movie. It misses out on a few key plot points, like the fact that Katniss is only fighting in the games because she volunteered to save her sister. Or that whole part where Katniss and Peeta are pretending (or are they?) to be in love in order to try and win sympathy from the Panem viewers at home.
Still, it’s a funny way to remind us how captivated we all were by The Hunger Games franchise a few years ago. That’s not a bad idea on their part, since we’ll soon be treated to another installment of the series when Suzanne Collins’ new prequel novel is adapted into a film.
