Entry 5: RE: "Cabin" - 'May the Gods Be Ever in Your Favor'

Posted by: Bradley Redder


Okay. As I said before: I think that you and I feel very similarly about Cabin. We both enjoyed it as a piece of mild entertainment, and we both seem to agree that the last twenty or so minutes could have been lopped off completely with very little complaint. So my vehemence over aspects of it puts you in the awkward position of having to stand up for a movie that you don't seem to find worthy of strong defense. You liked it, but are more than willing to point out its flaws, so I'll lay down my sword. I'll just say that I was only so aggressive about it because I wanted to like it--No, I did like it. A lot. And then it just fell apart and squandered all of its potential. Seeing it a second time made that fact even more annoying for me. I stand by my original position, but I'm willing to concede that it's entertaining, and sometimes that's enough.

However; there is one thing I want to bring up that struck me as a little strange while watching Cabin. Did you happen to notice how remarkably similar it was to The Hunger Games? Ditch the meta-horror premise, and it's almost the same thing. Young kids are chosen from the outside world and essentially asked to kill or be killed in the service of preserving world order. They're transplanted to an artificial setting whose environment is controlled from the outside by people trying to please someone... In the case of The Hunger Games, that is the masses, or maybe the world leaders (it was never really all that clear), and in Cabin the characters are made to suffer in order to satisfy the godlike "ancients."

I found myself distracted by these comparisons throughout the entire viewing experience, and was thinking about how two such similar films could be released three weeks apart, whether it was coincidence or a reflection of where we are culturally... Is this be the beginning of a trend of cynically paranoid film plots? I later found out that Cabin was actually filmed in 2009 and got shelved for a bit, so maybe this is all moot. But even if it's simply coincidence, it's a bizarre one.