Not strictly television; but creatively beautiful. So I'm sharing and telling.
As iconic as a Coruscant, as geniusly fully-developed as a Gummi Glen, and as detailed as Diagon Alley is the Capitol - the place where a part of the new upcoming movie The Hunger Games is set and which starts on Friday in America.
Part of what makes it wonderful: The fact that the Capitol is this ultra-lux futuristic place, although the reality is that it's actually a very post-apocalyptic world. In the future, America is gone and there is this oppressive empire where young people fight (it televised, it's popular, it detracts the masses). This annual fight is viscious and barbaric and is called ''The Hunger Games''. There's only one winner.
Lionsgate has gone live with a beautiful website to promote the movie, called The Capital Tour. If you've loved the stylistic look of Bladerunner, The Fifth Element; think Gene Rodenberry was genius with the set design of the Enterprise D, or somehow wished you could see even more of the sad inside of the dwarf kingdom we only glimpsed inside Gimli's mountain in The Lord of the Rings, I promise that you will love this.
The website gives visitors the experience of ''arriving'' in the Capitol as a resident of one of the ''districts'' - a place which is obviously a whole world removed from how the real citizens in the wider world of what is left of what was once America, live now. (What used to be America is now called Panem, hence the .pn instead of .com)
The holographic sheet glass avatar - an interactive visitors' guide - reminds me of the future New York Metropolitan Museum's encyclopedic helper in the updated The Time Machine. Of course you can't not get the impression of New York's Grand Central Station as well.
The clothes and somewhat anachronistic fashions - especially the vivid colour and elaborate headgear - reminds me of The Fifth Element, Doctor Who, Star Wars' Coruscant and places like where Alice in Wonderland finds herself: a society that's actually a distopia [the opposite of an utopia], a place supressing people and actually disguising its true nature under a thin veneer of over-exuberance expressed in apparent cheerful art, style and design.
Besides an honours degree in psychology and a journalism degree I also dabbled post-graduately in science fiction and looking at the representation of different utopian and distopian visions of the future. Simply because i wanted to. I just love this kind of stuff and can honestly talk and dissect it for hours.
The website is cool and contains hidden features. Try and keep the sound on to get the full effect.
