Scene It Sunday #4: The Hunger Games Movie Review

The Hunger Games
Series: The Hunger Games, #1
Source: Bought
Leads: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson

Katniss Everdeen voluntarily takes her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games, a televised fight to the death in which two teenagers from each of the twelve Districts of Panem are chosen at random to compete.

 

I'm just going to come right out here and say it. I honestly don't think that the movie is as good as the book was. But to be honest, I never really expected it to be, so I'll just go on to talk about the bits that I like.

I feel like Jennifer Lawrence was the perfect actress to play Katniss - I really think that she does it well. She shows some emotion, but a lot of the time she appears to be very tough and together, which is what Katniss always portrayed to me. There was nothing that I found lacking about her acting skills.

Josh Hutcherson (who plays Peeta), was also a good actor, but I always pictured Peeta a bit different than him, I guess. He just wasn't who I expected, although he does the part fairly well. I missed the interactions between Katniss an Peeta - in the book, they had a lot more conversations and just... you know... togetherness. That was missing from the movie. I think that the director & producers made a decision to focus more on the action, rather than the character development. I think that only people who read the book will be even slightly bothered by that, though.

I liked the bleak look of District 12 - it was so gray and depressing and pretty much perfect in my eyes, and so was the capitol. Upon first watching of this movie, I didn't think that they were crazy enough looking, but I'm thinking that now they look pretty well made up. Effie was perfectly over the top, and Rue was just as sweet as she was in the book.

There were several smaller parts that I didn't care for  - I don't particularly like the part of Gale - he just wasn't in the movie very much, and I didn't connect with him. Haymitch was okay, but I always imagined him as more of an extreme drunk.

I liked seeing the gamemaker setup - it was interesting to see something from that side, and I enjoyed the actual game scenes. They were pretty well done. I just couldn't get into the many silent parts, though. I found them oddly disconcerting. They made sense with the overall style, but I just wish they had done it differently. I actually had an awkward moment of trying to figure out how it was that the sound wasn't working anymore.

All in all, The Hunger Games movie was interesting, and I liked seeing one of my favorite books on screen, but I think that it could have been better.