The Hunger Games: The Movie Version

 

I hadn’t been to the movie theater since Toy Story 3 was out. I’m just not really a fan of going to the movies. It’s expensive. You don’t know what kind of crowd you’re going to encounter. Will they be respectful movie goers? Or will someone bring their screaming, sick baby or talk on their phone or kick my seat or whatever other annoyances can occur at the theater?

But last Wednesday I went to see The Hunger Games and had a pretty pleasant movie experience. It was a great crowd for a packed theater. People were pretty engrossed in the movie the whole time.

I’d read the books. I really enjoyed them and have been waiting for the first movie to come out since I finished them. So, yes, expectations were high. I’d also been reading pretty much glowing reviews of the movie, so my hopes were up.

I was kind of disappointed.

Not that it was a bad movie. It just could have been so much better. I know they had to cram a lot into one film and with a running time of over 2 hours already, a lot had to be cut. But it seems the stuff they cut was kind of important and, if you hadn’t read the books, you would have been very confused.

Jennifer Lawerence was great as Katniss. She really did an excellent job. Josh Hutchinson as Peeta totally bugged. He walked around with his mouth hanging open the whole time. Just generally kind of unlikeable. And I liked him in the book. Gale, with his very minimal appearance in the film, came across as a meathead. Woody Harrelson made Haymitch a comical character, when in the book I found him to be quite tragic. Sure, he had some funny, drunken lines. But his story is really quite sad. I found it odd that the audience in the theater laughed at so many sad things. It was weird.

Surprisingly, I thought Lenny Kravitz made an excellent Cinna and was sorely underutilized. The movie really glossed over his relationship with Katniss except for right before she heads into the games. It was another time where the filmmakers went with the idea that everyone has read the books so we really don’t need to show this relationship grow. Everyone will just know that Cinna is important.

And that was really what kept happening. It was like they made the movie not as a movie on its own, but more as just a visual accompaniment to the book. Like you almost had to read along as you went so things made sense.

• They shoved in the backstory about Katniss’s father in a dream sequence.
• They tried to show how Peeta saved Katniss’s life by tossing her the bread in some terrible flashback cut scenes that were very confusing without any sort of narrative as to what they were supposed to mean.
• One moment during the games, from Katniss’s perspective, it appears Peeta is trying to kill her. Then, suddenly, she finds out there can be two victors and she seeks him out to help him without ever asking him why he was ganging up against her (like she does in the books).

There was just a lot left out that left the story very confusing. I was trying to view it as someone who did not read the books and I just thought that it seemed off.

I will say the sets were fantastic and, in my opinion, a good visual representation of what I had imagined.