The Verdict on The Hunger Games

Hunger Games
Hunger Games
Promotional poster courtesy of Lionsgate

I’ll admit I was late to join the Hunger Games bandwagon. In fact, I didn’t want to read it at all. After my sisters begged me, I brought the book on a spring break bus ride to New York City, hoping that its presence would make me do homework. An hour into an essay, I was bored and started to read. Of course, I was instantly addicted like almost everyone else. I’m so glad I read it, especially because I was just in time for the movie, which I went out and saw as soon as possible.

For the most part, I was satisfied. Author Suzanne Collins, who used to write for children’s television shows, had a huge part in writing the screenplay, so the details that were included were almost completely accurate. There are elements that were left out that make it harder for readers to connect with the movie as much as they connected with the book.

One major element that got lost was the emotional attachment to the characters. The audience never really meets the tributes as they did in the novel. In the movie, characters that readers get to know very well in the book seem to be thrown into the Games and killed off very quickly before the audience can get attached, and quite frankly, it’s disappointing.

The readers in the audience do have to be sympathetic to the screenwriters for some choices they made. The entire book is written as first-person stream of consciousness from Katniss’s point of view, so of course the movie can’t be as emotional and not as much can be explained. It could only be closer to the book if the movie were narrated and much longer. The only change I don’t understand is why they cut out Madge Undersee’s character completely. Although she’s not necessarily important to the plot of the second book and soon to be movie, her contribution is interesting and significant.

Then there’s the matter of non-readers in the audience, whose problems with the movie also deal with a lack of narration. For them, the sequence of action and all the details are great, since they don’t know the actual plotline.  However, they lose explanations of some simple things that make the movie and novel interesting. I saw the movie with a non-reader and found myself explaining some of the basic plot.

Little details about the world they live in get lost without narration. I had to explain District 12’s three-finger salute, why everyone in the Capitol was dressed the way they were and even where everything in Panem was. Also, the film doesn’t transition into the second movie very well for non-readers because they don’t understand just how seriously Katniss betrayed the Capitol. Her crimes seem very nonchalant.

In the end, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the movie. The acting was good (who knew Lenny Kravitz could act?!) and none of the actors cast strayed too far from the descriptions in the novel. All the shots and scenery were well composed. I understand for the most part why some details were included and others were not. Now I’m at the point where I hope seeing the movie doesn’t make me picture the actors as the book characters while I finish reading the series. Because that is not what President Snow looks like.

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