Fun new realigame started on America’s The CW a few days ago, Capture. It’s the effectively the unofficial game of the film of the book The Hunger Games (which rather embarrassingly I haven’t actually watched yet).
It stars twelve teams of two (and fans of colours (especially green) are well served here, there’s a green, a lime AND teal team, probably the first and last time you’ll see the word ‘teal’ used on US television) and it’s hosted by a man who appears to be genuinely called Luke Tipple who is also an Australian marine biologist, it says here.
Effectively it’s Bother’s Bar favourite Run for Money done as a reality show. The teams play in the Hunting Grounds, a 4,000 acre bit of land with trees, hills, bears and the like, however the GREATEST THREAT is, as is so often the case in these things, your fellow man. One team is randomly chosen to be the Hunters who are each given a Talon – like a magnetic disk. The other teams are the prey, and must run away because if the Hunters manage to place a Talon on one of their vests then they have been caught. Hunters get two days and four hours a day to capture two teams – failure to meet the quota means going up for elimination themselves, and if they don’t catch anyone being immediately eliminated. To help them, each team wears a GPS map, and whatsmore if a team of prey stay still for longer than three minutes, their location will pop up on the Hunter’s GPS.
Captured teams are taken to an open air prison where they must sleep braving the elements, but the other teams don’t have it well off either, the Village consists of metal frame bunk beds with no mattresses and some items in a box they can make a rudimentary tent with. Food is scarce, but they do have a fire, and we’re shown that temperatures at night are barely above freezing.
At elimination, the two teams on the chopping block (the two teams caught, or the Hunters if they didn’t meet their quota) stand on platforms, each with two bridges – one back into the game, one out of the compound. One by one and boringly the other teams decide who they want to send home. Once one team has reached enough votes and in a fit of HIGH DRAMA the bridges collapse so one team can rejoin and the other go home. At the end of the series (and I’m intrigued to find out how they’re going to decide the winner) the winning team win $250k.
Nice concept, and nicely filmed, the biggest problem with episode one for me was lack of crunch points – the area of play is huge and it’s pretty unlikely teams will accidentally bump into each other whereas in something like Run For Money not only are there loads of players but the playing area is small enough that there will be an exciting chase every few minutes – I’m also really hoping they start to throw some twists into the game as well even if it’s just reducing the area of the hunt. Living with the spartan conditions is quite appealing, it’s going to be as much a test of endurance as anything else. There were also probably a few too many teams for their own good, certainly quite a few of them seemed to get passed over this first episode. And the voting element is boring.
It doesn’t smell like a hit to me – the tone is a bit ridiculous for a start – but I enjoyed watching and will continue to watch. Worth seeking out.
Apparently the area will be reduced as the show goes on- I suspect what’ll happen in the end is the last few teams will end up chasing each other with the last team standing winning.
To be fair, this is the CW we’re talking about – the number of viewers it needs to be considered a “hit” will be relatively small.
My biggest issue that I see is how they are going to keep the theme fresh week after week. It seems as if the structure of events are going to be the same – two hunts, one elimination per episode. Sure, watching the first hunt was interesting, but will it still be interesting the 20th time they do it? I’m not so sure.
Absolutely, you can only really judge relative to The CWs output I thnk.
I actually really enjoyed Capture, at least up until the elimination vote. I thought the pace was good, production design is quite literally taken straight from The Hunger Games but I personally think that works in it’s favour rather than against it. The wide shots when the teams first run from the gates are excellent. My only fear is that they put too much focus on the ‘reality’ aspect of the show as the series progresses, rather than keeping the actual game fresh.
My main issue with this episode was the lack of explaining the rules clearly beforehand. The bare bones was clear but it wasn’t explained whether both team members had to be captured or not, or that only one team could be captured on the first day it would seem (I presume that if the hunt team fails to capture a team in the first day they are able to get 2 on the second day to reach the quota).
It’s far from flawless, but I thought it was a good watch and I look forward to next week.
I have to say I’m really enjoying capture. It seems to be striking a really good balance between the reality aspects and the game itself. They’ve got a nice selection of teams playing and narrative to follow with the food destruction by the blues. Also any show that can match The Movie Game for ridiculous team colours is OK by me.
One reservation I have is that a hunting team is yet to lose, hopefully we have just had excellent hunt teams so far. If I could change one thing I’d change the elimination vote so that only the teams up for elimination see who votes where – and get rid of those clunky bridges.
I’ve gome a bit Robot Combat League on Capture, in that I quite enjoyed the first one and haven’t bothered to aeek it out since. I’ll probably catch up with it over the next week though.
Anyone else been following this? I’ve actually found the series to improve over the run so far, even the elimination section has become more interesting than the first episode where it very much dragged.
The “shock twist” in the sixth episode made me stop watching completely – it was utterly game-breaking. If you haven’t been following it, on the sixth hunt, all the prey teams were told that their alarms would sound continuously until one team found a Mystery Box, hidden in the forest, the location of which was revealed once the Hunt Team was released. The team who got that mystery box then got to overthrow the hunt team, and select a new one for the second day’s hunt. The way it ended up happening though was that the hunt team only found out this power as they were about to eat their meal, which then got taken away from them and given to the winners of the Mystery Box, and the team who they caught on the first day were released and used as the hunt team on the second day, catching the original hunt team. It was an awful twist.
There’s two eps left, both this week. The final will involve three teams, unknown how they’ll work it though..(if I had to guess? One team is selected as the hunt team, and they either have to catch a team to eliminate them or they themselves are eliminated. Then the team who wasn’t caught (or a random team if neither were) gets to decide if they want to be the hunt team or the prey team for the final- if the hunt team catches the last team, they win, if they don’t the prey team wins).
Well the final 2 is interesting- it’s a smaller game area, and both teams are the hunters and the prey- the roles switch every 15 minutes until there’s a winner, so you either have to stop hunting early on to get away when the roles switch or go all out and risk being easily caught if you run out of time..