Quickie Review of "The Hunger Games"

Adam and I went to see "The Hunger Games" today.

It was good. Unsurprisingly, it was much less violent than the book - they were definitely aiming for a PG-13, and not the hard R the book's content would seem to imply. Sadly, part of the way they accomplished this was through very shaky camera work that kept you from seeing what was happening. Occasionally it worked (during the initial bloodbath at the Cornucopia it felt right), but often it was just nausea-inducing.

Also, without a view inside Katniss' head, it's a very different story.

However, they alleviated a lot of the potential confusion by using the gamemakers and show hosts as exposition monkeys, and the added scenes between the chief gamemaker and the president were actually solidly helpful to the story, and were the right choice, I think.

My only other complaint is that you didn't get an idea of what a slog the Hunger Games was - of the sheer length and exhaustion of it. You sort of couldn't given the time constraints, but . . . it was a loss.

But there was much more good than bad. Just seeing the Capitol, and hearing their excitement over the games, was terrifying. Every time a Capitol citizen twittered on about how wonderful it all was, the actors who played Katniss and Peeta made you remember, with the subtlest of expressions, that the Capitol citizens were excited about killing children. The juxtaposition of indulgence and bloodthirstiness was possibly even more effective on the screen than it was on the page, and if you walked out of the theatre without thinking of your own overconsumption well . . . you weren't paying enough attention.

Overall? I think it would be confusing on its own, but as a companion piece to the book, I thought it was quite good. I thought the first half was better than the second. And I now want to go and reread the second and third books again, to try to figure out how in the world they're going to film them.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell