Studying “The Hunt”
“The Hunt” is a horror satire where liberal elitists hunt and kill conservatives for sport. It was originally scheduled for autumn of last year but with also many mass shootings in America, the film got delayed and pushed back to March.
Overall, it’s not a great movie, which makes it a perfect candidate to study for what it does right and what it does wrong. Any time you watch a flawed movie, look at how you might do something different.
As a horror film, “The Hunt” provides plenty of gore. As a satire, its story is actually fairly coherent and logical. The problem is the execution where it’s lacking.
As the liberals kill the conservatives, they make their point through awkward dialogue that feels forced and out of place. While humorous, this dialogue hurts the story rather than helps it.
In one scene in “The Hunt,” a seemingly normal elderly couple running a fake convenience store has murdered three people and they’re discussing how to deal with the bodies. Unfortunately, this dialogue exists solely to poke fun at the typical cliches of liberals in talking about white men running everything and getting news from NPR.
A far more effective scene occurs when the hero and another man are running from being hunted and hide in a railroad car filled with refugees. The man with the hero starts calling these refugees fakes as crisis actors, and then it turns out one man actually is acting as a fake. In this case, the dialogue makes sense because the man thinks the refugees are all fake.
What weakens “The Hunt” is what weakens many mediocre movies in that the theme isn’t used throughout the story since it’s inconsistent. Basically the movie tries to use the theme of “Animal Farm” by constantly introducing a pig periodically and references to Snowball, a good character from “Animal Farm.”
Yet that weak theme doesn’t make sense. The villain calls the hero Snowball but it makes little sense. There’s also little logic in referencing “Animal Farm” with a pig periodically.
Where “The Hunt” does succeed in a theme is the nature of truth. Essentially both liberals and conservatives believe in their own version of the truth and ignore facts. This theme works best when the hero is in a railroad car filled with refugees and a man claims they’re simply actors pretending to be refugees. Then it turns out one refugee really is acting.
This theme also plays out in the end when the hero tells the villain that the villain actually got the wrong person right after the villain says that the conservatives crated so many lies about liberals hunting conservatives that the liberals decided to actually do it, so the conservatives made the truth real.
If “The Hunt” had simply used this theme consistently in every scene, the story would have been much stronger. Because every scene in “The Hunt” fails to reflect this theme, the action in the movie feels much weaker and meaningless.
There’s a lot to learn from watching “The Hunt”, both good and bad. Try watching any good or bad movie and then you’ll see what works and what does not. That way you can learn from any movie you watch whether it’s any good or not.
