Minor Plot hole: All the 24 candidates had mentors to help them prepare for the games. Haymitch, Katniss’s mentor was drunk the whole time, but it is fair to assume many other mentors were snorting cocaine off of each other’s assholes because they failed to have the following essential discussion with their protégés:
Kid, you are kind of weak. Weak enough that my dead cat would get more sponsors than you. So don’t run for the supplies like a dumb-ass while the steroid-fueled warriors like Kato will get there decades before you and start punching you so hard your balls will drop 2 years before they were meant to drop. Aim for the woods and pray that the other kids wound and kill each other so that you can win by default by throwing rocks at them.
Minor Plot hole: For a competition called the Hunger Games, there is a serious lack of hunger to be found. Haymitch mentions that water will be Katniss’s new best friend – this is why the battleground of the games includes a giant river, because you know, water is rare. Food is also very abundant and the nights are warm. Either Haymitch is too drunk to remember how the games really were or there was a change in the design of the games that only started now.
Minor Plot hole: A tiny girl who gets impaled by a spear as big as her legs will stay alive for the 5 long minutes that will be required to make the saddest scene in the movie. But a bigger kid who gets shot by an arrow to the chest will fall dead before he reaches the ground because screw him – we don’t want to hear him suffer and suffocate on his own blood, that would ruin the sad scene a few feet away.
Minor Plot hole: Cannon sounds are heard every time contestants are killed. ”Every time” in this context means when the editor was actually focused on what was happening on screen because half of the deaths witnessed by Katniss were followed by zero Cannon sound: Rue, the asshole who killed Rue, the smurf who got his neck snapped by Kato, and the beehive-face girl.
Minor Plot hole: Seneca Cane is an inconsistent man. Sometimes he likes to speed things up in the games by transforming the forest into the rape-child of Armageddon and Hell just to push Katniss towards the other kids. Sometimes he likes to do nothing at all and bore the audience by letting Katniss sleep for days or by letting Peeta slowly die from a leg infection while costuming himself as a tree for other candidates to step on. I am sure the audience was entertained watching the star-crossed lovers doing nothing on the ground for days. It’s almost as if Cane’s inconsistency was driven by plot factors. Almost.
Major Plot hole: The leader of this dystopian future, Snow, is a senile man who has no idea what he is doing….unless it’s taking care of a garden. When referencing the Hunger Games, he mentions that ”The only thing stronger than fear is hope”. Fair enough. But the Hunger Games does exactly none of this. You see – there is no hope in the games. Every year, 23 kids get killed while 1 survives to be dead inside. The games do not offer any hope apart from ”saving” one of the sacrificed children. Kids get killed and humiliated in front of the whole world and the elite bets on who will survive. This is pure fear – no hope. A hope-inclined project would be something similar to a contest where every year, 1 person from all districts is chosen at random to join the capital. This is hope. The hunger game is simply a mass sacrifice of children for past sins none of them committed. It boils everyone’s blood and ironically pushes them to train as soldiers for upcoming games and/or revolutions against the stupid Chef Gardener.
Unaddressed Issue: The Hunger Games is an old-school type of fight to the death. Limited food supplies, fights in a forest, bows and swords….and land mines. God damn land mines. That looks out of place. I don’t recall any stories of the Knights of the Round table using land mines to explode heretics. Did history books and Wikipedia burn during the revolution?
Unaddressed Issue: The muttation dogs were very dangerous for the Hunger Games. Not only for the contestants but also for the whole system since there was a significant chance of seeing all remaining contestants being eaten alive instead of allowing one to survive. Was their a fail-safe button? It could be the case because when Kato died, the mutated dogs vanished from space. Either way, it’s sloppy.
