Sport Versus Survival

A lot of times, when someone reads a book, they see the movie and its completely changed.  Recently, my class read and watched “The Most Dangerous Game.”  The themes, among many other parts of the book and movie, were drastically different.  The main difference of themes between the movie and short story “The Most Dangerous Game” are that the former’s theme is about survival of the fittest, and the latter’s theme is about hunters versus huntees.

In the short story and movie “The Most Dangerous Game” a man named Rainsford ends up on an island starving, without anything but the clothes on his back.  He stays in the house of a man named Zaroff, who he later finds out hunts people for sport, and is forced to play “The most dangerous game” with another person on the island, named Eve, against Zaroff.  The theme of “The Most Dangerous Game” short story is mostly about hunters versus huntees.  For example, Rainsford says in the beginning of the story “This world is made up of two classes - the hunters and the huntees.  Luckily, you and I are hunters.”  However, later in the story, he becomes a huntee when being hunted down by General Zaroff, and acts like a fox would in the means of escaping a hunter, when he “executed a series of intricate loops; he doubled on his train again and again, recalling all the lore of the fox hunt, and all the dodges of the fox.”  This shows that at first, Rainsford believed that one could only be a hunter or a huntee, and not both.  This also shows that he found out what it was like to be the hunted, and realized the fragile line between the two.  This theme, however, is slightly different from the theme in the movie The Most Dangerous Game.

In the movie The Most Dangerous Game, the theme is about “Survival of the fittest,” and how one must outsmart one’s enemies to beat them and survive.  For example, in the movie, Rainsford and Eve try to outsmart Zaroff by laying several traps for him.  They make a trap so that when the general steps on a trigger that is a bough, a giant, dead tree will fall on top of him.  Sadly, the general sees through this trap, and doesn't fall for it, as well as other traps like trying to make him fall off of a cliff.  However, Rainsford bests Zaroff in the end, when Rainsford is attacked by a hunting dog and Zaroff shoots him, but hits the dog instead, which he doesn’t realize.  Rainsford goes back to Zaroff’s house and and wounds Zaroff, who falls out of a window to be eaten by his hunting dogs.  This shows that Rainsford and Zaroff both prove that they are clever enough to beat the other with all of the traps and avoidings of traps when they are hunting each other.  This also shows that Rainsford is smarter and fitter than Zaroff, because he tricks Zaroff into thinking he is dead.  He wins the game because of his cleverness.  In conclusion, the differences between the movie and short story “The Most Dangerous Game” are that the movie’s theme was about survival of the fittest, and the short stories theme was about being a hunter versus a huntee.