I just thought this movie was alright on my first viewing. There were a few aspects I really liked about it such as the middle scene and the depiction of the hunger strike. However, I originally disliked how attention was taken away from most of the characters introduced in the first act. Overall, it feels like an odd choice to introduce multiple characters only to have them leave the film half an hour later, doesn't it? However, after I revisited this movie a couple more times, I loved it to such great of an extent that it's now one of my favorite films of all time.Northern Ireland, 1981. After the government withdraws the political status of all paramilitary prisoners, the inmates of the Maze Prison retaliate by forming a blanket and a no wash protest, ultimately leading to a hunger strike led by one of the inmates, Bobby Sands.This movie is clearly an unconventional film due to the lack of dialogue and the plot structure. One thing I've learned from watching unconventional movies is that while they may have glaring flaws on the surface, the director might have a good reason for making the film that way. For instance, Bela Tarr and Michael Snow had good reasons for drawing out Satantango and Wavelength as much as they did and Stan Brakhage had good reasons for including no sound in most of his films. Sometimes, if I think more about aspects which seem like glaring flaws in unconventional films, it starts to make sense that a director would make their film that way. That was how I warmed up to this film.What I love about this movie is its unique story structure. I initially thought it was a traditional three-act structure. However, I make the argument that the first and the third acts are bookends to the dialogue sequence in the middle. The first act showed the failed protests and the consequences they had on both the guards and the prisoners, the second act showed a prisoner revealing his plans of a more organized protest, and the third act showed that protest in action. By featuring only one prisoner in the third act, I think the statement McQueen is making here is that the hunger strike protest worked better as, since there were less people involved, it was more organized. I initially criticized the movie for taking attention away from several of the characters introduced in the first act, but I now think that this decision helped the film.Another point which McQueen appears to be making here is that both sides are tired of the protest but are unwilling to back down. This is conveyed in numerous places such as how Raymond Lohan can be seen cleaning his bloodied knuckles a couple times in the film. There's also a powerful moment where a prison guard can be seen crying while the rest of the guards beat numerous prisoners with batons. This implication also extends to different prisoners such as Gerry as his emotions convey fright and determination as he smears his faeces on the wall for the protest. These scenes add a layer of humanity to this film.It's also hard not to talk about the number of memorable moments found in the film such as the captivating and well-acted dialogue sequence in the middle which feels like the film's centerpiece. Besides that scene, however, dialogue feels unimportant to absorbing the rest of the film and its characters, so the mostly dialogue free film seems to thrive on this restriction. There's also other chilling moments outside of the dialogue such as when Lohan is killed by an IRA assassin in front of his catatonic mother who seems unaware of her surroundings. Another great scene is the long, stationary, and expressive shot of a prison attendant cleaning up multiple puddles of urine. Finally, it's hard not to mention the painfully realistic depiction of Sands' hunger strike. To film that sequence, Fassbender went on a diet of less than 900 calories for 10 weeks to give the illusion of starvation. This sequence was filled with clever moments such as a montage of Sands' food servings slowly getting smaller as he inched closer to death, images and sounds of flying birds as he convulsed in pain, and what I think was his hallucination near the end of his strike.In conclusion, I think this film is a masterpiece, and it's, currently, my favorite film of the 2000's. It's also one of the best debut films I've seen before. While this film can be hard to watch due to the brutal and disturbing content found throughout, it remains so compelling for a variety of reasons that you can't turn away from the picture. Not for the faint of heart, but a must-see for older viewers.

'Hunger' is a British-Irish Historical Drama about the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. It's a film that's tough to watch, showing prison brutality and conditions at its most absolute rawest, and it visually looks the part (age and grime and all). Being fact-based certainly lends emotions to events depicted which would be absent if it were a fictional account, but the direction here is forgettable. Too many meandering scenes of banal activities waste precious time in a picture that wouldn't make it past the hour mark had liberties not been taken on scene lengths where the camera lingers on something uninteresting for too long. We even get a man sweeping liquid down a corridor for a couple of minutes, when you get the point after 10 seconds. It serves little purpose, and the static camera-work is detriment to the cause. Steve McQueen would repeat this dull filmmaking style with 12 Years a Slave many years later. One impressive scene is when Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham share time together, giving us a 17 minute unbroken shot of a conversation. But that's not down to direction or cinematography, but to the credit of the actors for memorising their lines. Speaking of Fassbender, he undergoes a shocking physical transformation (clue is in the title), displaying his commitment to accurately portray and tell the story of the character. That dedication to his performance in what is really an independent piece of work is commendable, showing early on his potential as a leading man.I'm not trying to undermine the story that is the heart and core of this film, I just believe it could have been filmed much better with less tedium to keep me invested. And for that I give it 6/10.

HUNGER (2007), the first effort by director Steve McQueen, is a dramatization of the 1981 hunger strike carried out by IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland. Seeing themselves as political prisoners, these men demanded to wear their own clothes instead of prison uniforms, have greater visiting rights, and be free from prison work. The most prominent participant in the strike was Bobby Sands, who died after 66 days without food.The film can be divided into three parts. The first presents the prison conditions that the men suffered before the strike. We see this routine through the eyes of two minor prisoners and a guard. Beatings are regular, the prisoners are left naked with only a single blanket to cover themselves with in freezing weather, and for the most part, the prison officials are portrayed as brutal automatons as stripped of their humanity as the Roman soldiers on Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, which makes the pangs of conscience of a couple of them all the more moving. The second part is a hinge in the action. Sands (Michael Fassbender) comes to the forefront, explaining his motives to a priest (Liam Cunningham) in an ambitious 17-minute single shot. Finally, the last third of the film tracks Sands' weakening and death. Sands' deterioration -- he's soon covered with sores and reduced to a skeleton -- is graphic, and one wonders how the filmmakers did it, because it seems to go well beyond mere makeup effects.For someone unfamiliar with the Troubles, the prison conditions were sad and outrageous, as if prisoners were treated like this in the early 1980s, then the West was compromising its values of humanity and justice. HUNGER thus introduced me to a sorry episode in recent history and it's valuable for that. However, I'm uncomfortable with the latter half of the story, which goes beyond the principle that everyone, even the incarcerated, deserves humane treatment. Sands is portrayed not only as a man standing up for better treatment in prison, but as a soldier with wider political goals, a lingering desire to unite Ireland by violence. There's also touches of religious symbolism, Sands as Christ figure, which is too pat and downright offensive considering he was an incarcerated terrorist. Yes, even the message that even criminals deserve fair treatment is a noble one, but you've still got to acknowledge that the man's political designs were heinous.Still, even if the plot is irksome and a couple of shots seem like padding (what's up with the long floor-mopping scene?), there are some fine aspects of the film. The set design is meticulous. Cunningham brings the air of an experienced stage actor into the film, which works surprisingly well. Seeing this film upon its release, I suspected McQueen would progress to great things and I was curious to see his future work.

Although Hunger was Steve McQueen's debut feature film, I watched Shame which was his 2nd film before Hunger. His style looked unique and brutally explicit, but at the same time delicately artistic with the right amount of reticence to challenge the viewer. I was so glad to find the same positive attributes about his directorial work in Hunger too. He is one of the most recent directors whom I can easily call an auteur due to his signature style.Like Shame, Hunger is also at times a very tough film to watch. McQueen leaves absolutely no stone unturned to depict the brutal realism connected with the subject matter. The film on the surface is about the well known IRA member Bobby Sand's revolt and the hunger strike that he declared to force the British Government to grant the demands of the IRA. But to be honest, the film has very little to do with the politics of the matter. McQueen is more concerned with the people caught in the midst of this traumatic stalemate situation. He is concerned with the psychological and of course the physical effect this situation has on these characters. I liked the fact that McQueen effectively remains unbiased and neutral throughout the whole film. This neutrality is accentuated by the fact that he uses the perspective of different people belonging to either side of the tussle in the screenplay. So not only do we get to live these traumatic days from the point of view of Bobby Sands and his fellow prisoners, but also from the point of view of prison guards and riot officers. It is shown that the ones executing the strikes might have had to endure physical pain and torture, but the ones on the other side had to endure psychological torture too as well as the lack of security in public. One of the most admirable features of Hunger is the use of silence in the film. Almost 75% of the scenes are silent or with very little dialogue. McQueen allows the visuals and facial gestures of the actors to convey a lot in many scenes in the film. The makeup of the actors and production design are also meticulous with a lot attention to detail. The prison cells look as realistic and as dirty and grim as possible. The prisoners look equally worn out due to the harsh treatments handed out to them. The makeup is so detailed that even the teeth of the prisoners look worn out and decayed.There is a famous one take conversation scene in the film that goes on for about 15 minutes. The conversation in this scene is almost as serene as a Symphony. It starts out on a light note, then becomes heavy and heated and then ends almost poetically. When a single take scene which continues for such a long while works so well, all you can do is appreciate the acting and the writing that has gone into it. Talking about acting, Michael Fassbender sets the stage on fire with a jaw dropping performance. The film's subject matter and the content being too bold for the consideration of the Academy is the only reason I can think of which can explain why Fassbender didn't get an Oscar nomination for this role. He becomes the character of Bobby Sands through absolutely brutal method acting. He is unbelievably good.Overall I loved the film. The only sort of gripe that I have is with the ending. Although I liked the ending, but I wanted it to be a bit more effective and memorable. But having said that, it is a minor gripe. Hunger is not for everyone, it is disturbing, it is visually explicit and Mcqueen demands patience and attention from the viewer. But if you are prepared for all this, then you are surely going to have a rewarding experience.