Movie review- THE HUNT (2020)
Caution- spoiler alerts in this review
The movie The Hunt [1] debuted in 2020 to some various levels of controversy. The movie was to be released in 2019, but was delayed after the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.
The primary plot device was that some given individuals were hunting other humans for sport. The plot initially brought to mind the 1994 movie Surviving the Game, starring Ice-T (now of Law and Order SVU fame) as an down and out man offered a job as a game warden only to find out his wealthy benefactors were using him as the prey. I have since found out there have been numerous iterations of the premise which is based on a short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell in 1924. The Hunt is merely the latest of numerous adaptations.
The movie is worth a watch even if you read this review. Betty Gilpin plays the lead character shown in the movie poster. Hillary Swank also plays a lead role.
In a nutshell, the primary premise of THIS adaptation is a group of “liberal elites” kidnapping Trump-like supporters (“deplorable”) and using them as targets for their hunt. This element of the plot, of course, caused the Trumpo-sphere to blow a gasket. And they are the ones that like to go around calling liberals “snowflakes.” The problem is that their whining was based on only this shallow perception of the actual nature of the plot and ignored plot twists!
At the beginning, there is a depiction of back and forth text messages of liberals complaining about Trumpers and then, essentially, “we should take them to the manor and hunt them down.” Thus is born “Manor-gate.”
As the film develops, we find that the texts were written in jest. There was no manor, no hunt. But the texts leaked out and those on the texts all faced retribution- losing their jobs and positions. This caused those on the text chain to get together and concoct an actual Manor hunt. It wasn’t real before, but it will be real now!
You find out during the film that these liberal people then scour the internet for comments that were used to get them fired or otherwise portrayed them as elite evil people.
There were numerous deplorables killed pretty much right away. As many tried to band together, Betty Gilpin’s character, Crystal May Creasey, operates pretty much as loner. Her character appears pretty accomplished at survival techniques. She gradually winnows down the number of opponents as she makes her way to the “manor.”
She also finds out, after inspecting a vehicle, that they have been kidnapped to Croatia which is where the manor and hunting grounds are established.
She ends up having hand-to-hand fighting with Sergeant Dale, a military advisor to the liberal hunters. She is told by Dale that Athena, played by Hillary Swank, is a very accomplished fighter, having trained for months and won’t be an easy target. Dale gives her Athena’s location before Crystal kills him.
Crystal ends up confronting Athena in a real throwdown of fighting. During a pause in their conflict, Swank’s character Athena rails at Crystal for what she said online. Crystal tells Athena she got the wrong “Crystal” and that there is another woman from the area of her home with the exact same name and that she sometimes gets the other woman’s email. The Crystal in the movie is a combat military veteran, not the online deplorable Swank’s Athena really wanted to capture.
Probably the best take-away is the propensity for bad information to spread rapidly online and be taken out of context as well as be manipulated for certain people’s own ends. We saw that with “pizza-gate” and pretty much any Qanon posting. Liberals and progressives have their own versions of out-of-context reactions to the internet social media circus as well. We see it continue now with election denial and the war in Ukraine. Social media has been weaponized.
