Saturday, February 14, 2015

The Hunger Games


Having just read the book (review), I wanted to see how The Hunger Games movie compared.  How would they deal with the oppression of the Capitol and the heroics of District 12's Katniss Everdeen on the big screen?

There's a lot of good here.  The movie's plot follows the book very closely; the minor deviations present are forgivable, understandable, and even (in some cases) improvements to the story.  The casting is great, imagery is good, acting is fine . . . and yet, for all this, The Hunger Games movie is a great example of how a movie can never compare to a book.  Why?  Because a 2-hour movie simply can't adequately convey the hunger, endurance, pain, uncertainty, and emotion Katniss (and others) experience during the games.  That can only be captured (in my opinion) by a production of significantly longer length . . . so it would have to be a TV mini-series or something.  So, all told, this film didn't do anything overly wrong . . . it just suffers from constraints inherent in the medium.  General life lesson: read the book.

Rating: B

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