Review of The Hunger Games Movie

Bottom line: One of the best book to movie adaptations I’ve seen. A great movie of a great book (see my review of the book here).

Rating: Strongly Recommended

Review:

I am normally one of those people – the ones who come out of a movie adaptation of a book moaning and whining about all the things they completely screwed up and how much better the book was and what is wrong with humanity anyways?

I had seen the trailer and was incredibly unimpressed. I didn’t like the casting choices for any of the main characters and was thinking the movie was going to be a complete disaster. Well, I finally broke down and went and saw it yesterday. I don’t know if it was because my expectations were so low, but I absolutely loved it. It might be one of the best book to movie adaptations I have ever seen (might have something to do with the fact that the author, Suzanne Collins, was a co-writer of the screen play – hard to do that with, say, Tolkein).

There were obviously things that they changed, but I felt like almost all of the changes were just to make it work better as a movie, while still staying true the spirit of the books, if not the letter. One of the main concerns I had going into it was how you deal with the fact that the books are written from Katniss’ point of view, and a lot of it is about what is going on in her head. I think this was handled amazingly well. Instead of using narration (which rarely works), they added in pieces that were not in the books, but still fit within the story. For example, the Head Gamemaker becomes a bigger character, and you see him interacting with President Snow, and the behind the scenes of how the games are done. There are cuts to the tv show host talking with his co-anchor to explain things to the audience (both in the Capitol, and the one in the movie theater with you) that you get from Katniss in the books. My favorite was the fortune-cookie type notes from Haymitch that came with the gifts from sponsors.

I was not expecting very much from the actors chosen to play Katniss, Peeta, Gale, or Haymitch from what I saw in the trailer, but by the end of the movie everyone had won me over except Gale. They did a good job portraying District 12 as poor, dirty, and downtrodden, but Gale always looked like he’d walked out of a photo shoot for some teen magazine.

I was also impressed by how they handled the violence. Make no mistake, this is a story that centers around children slaughtering other children, often brutally, but they were able to portray the horror of the violence without being excessively graphic or gory.

The one thing that I really disliked was the shaky cameras. At the beginning of the movie and during parts of the actual Hunger Games they filmed in the jerky, fast moving style. I don’t find that it adds realism to the movie, I just find it annoying. Instead of thinking about the story, I’m thinking about how I wish they would stop yanking the cameras around.

All in all, however, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and can’t wait for the next one to come out!

Get it! Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target

What did you think? Did you like the movie? Had you read the book before seeing it?

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