The Hunger Games: Movie Review

"Forget Twilight's insipid Bella Swan. This is a literary heroine girls can cherish."  

(Note: It's a little embarrassing that I took that quote from People Magazine's review of The Hunger Games, but it's accurate, what can I say??)

O.k. so after fangirling over Hunger Games hardcore for the past 9 or 10 months (ever since I read the books back in June of last year) … I have now … FINALLY … seen the movie.  Twice.  Praise Jeebus.  I wanted to post a review of it because I’ve already posted several comments on my thoughts about the film on other sites, so I figured that I might as well expand on them a bit and turn it into an official review on my own blog.

But before I get to the review of the movie itself, I’ll start off with some background: I love this story.  LOVE. it.  If we take the last three most successful book-to-film YA sensations of the past decade or so, we have Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter.  Out of all three of those, it seems like the Hunger Games trilogy was tailored specifically for me – for the teenage me (who unfortunately could not benefit from this because it didn’t exist until 2008), and, let's be honest, even the adult me.  It has so many things I love: A strong female protagonist, an exciting story with a very dark/disturbing quality to it (I guess I have a sick mind), something that forces you to think beyond just the book itself, etc.  Should I feel embarrassed that I got so sucked into a YA series?  Heh maybe, but I don’t, because adults all over the world have been getting sucked into this stuff for quite a while now, and I think the Hunger Games series has social commentary that goes far beyond what a 12 year old would ever really want to ponder.  :-P  I think that’s why the books have been so popular with adults too.

Hunger Games gets a lot of shit for being a “rip-off” of Battle Royale, amongst other stories.  I totally get why that is, because from my perspective the story seems to be a mix of Battle Royale, The Running Man, The Truman Show, Lord of the Flies, and probably several other things.  But I tend to take the “rip-off” accusations with a grain of salt, because is there really ANY fictional story out there that is entirely unique?  Every book/movie/t.v. show borrows ideas from other things.  That doesn’t mean that it can’t be a good quality story on its own.  I’ve known of the existence of Battle Royale for about a decade and I actually did mean to read it and/or watch the movie, but I never got around to it.  Hunger Games then came along and pulled me in more strongly because of the female protagonist, so I went ahead and read that first.  And now at this point, I’m kind of purposely avoiding BR for another couple/few years, because I don’t want to spend the rest of my time with HG comparing the two.  :-P

So now, let’s get to the movie.  You’ll see in previous posts from last year that I was pretty convinced that the makers of this film were going to ruin it.  These things always have to be PG-13 to be appropriate for the teen and tween audience, but the problem with that is that a book can be labeled as "YA" and yet be substantially more dark, disturbing, and violent than what a PG-13 movie could ever get away with.  So my biggest fear with this film was that all the best and most thought-provoking elements of the book were going to get stripped away and/or watered down for the teen/tween movie audience.  So now that I’ve seen it … was my original fear correct?  Sort of.  But, I don’t think it was quite as severe as I had feared.

Writer/Director Gary Ross co-wrote the script with Suzanne Collins (the author of the HG trilogy), which I think probably greatly helped him to stay very true to the book.  However, with any book to movie translation, there’s a LOT that has to be cut out.  I would love to see every scene from the book acted out on the movie screen, but if they did that, the movie would be 20 hours long.  That ain’t gonna happen. This movie clocks in at 2 hrs and 22 minutes, which is pretty long for a movie to begin with.  And yet, when I watched the movie for the first time, it all went by in a flash.  It was like a split second went by and then boom, I was already being pushed back out of the theater again.  I was like “Wait … WTF??  It’s over already??”  Everything felt very rushed, because that’s just what happens when you condense an entire book into a 142 minute movie.

My cousin Katie and I discussed it and dissected it in great detail on the way home, and neither of us were entirely sure what our opinion of the film was.  We were pretty sure that it was mostly pretty good, but we couldn’t stop ourselves from focusing on everything that we were disappointed did NOT make it in.  There were just so many plot points that we thought were so key to conveying the full weight and message of the books, that had to be left out of the movie or just glossed over.  The area that this was most apparent was in the last 15 or 20 minutes of the film, which is where the entire climactic end of the arena sequence and final interviews and the return home for the victors has to be covered.

Now, I should preface this by saying that there was actually another element that pulled me into these books beyond just the strong female protagonist.  The comparison may sound dumb, but hear me out - It so happened that the book I had read right before reading HG was a book called With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.  It’s a World War II memoir by Eugene Sledge, a United States Marine at the time.  It’s one of the main books that HBO’s The Pacific was based on, which is why I read it.  We had also just recently watched Generation Kill, about the first days of the Iraq war in 2003.  For whatever reason I had accidentally or subconsciously gotten into a weird pattern of watching and reading about war-related subject matters for a few months, and I ended up becoming completely fascinated by how royally screwed up it is that a kid who is 17/18/19 years old (or any human being for that matter) can be put through such an utterly horrific and brutal and awful experience, and then be shipped back home again and try to go on with their life as a normal person.  I just can’t wrap my head around it.


The battlefield in the Pacific Theater in WWII was referred to as the “meat grinder” by Sledge and his fellow Marines, and you can guess why that is.  After reading the book, I can tell you that it’s an incredibly accurate description.  So I think partly what pulled me into the HG trilogy was that even though these are just "silly" YA novels, they actually have a more serious running theme of PTSD and kids being forced into violence, which seemed quite relevant to our actual society in the past, present, and future.  You don't normally expect to get social commentary like that in pulpy entertainment books for teeny boppers.  Suzanne Collins has actually said that she was inspired to write these books after flipping t.v. channels between reality shows and news segments about the war in Iraq.  The kids in the HG novels are barely even younger than kids that get shipped off to war in real life (not to mention shady militants in other areas of the world who happily use child soldiers on a regular basis).

Take that aspect, and then look at the reality t.v. angle as well - the aspect of exploiting people for money and entertainment.  Jennifer Lawrence was quoted in Parade Magazine as saying: "I was watching the Kardashian girl getting divorced, and that’s a tragedy for anyone. But they’re using it for entertainment, and we’re watching it. The books hold up a terrible kind of mirror: This is what our society could be like if we became desensitized to trauma and to each other’s pain."  Again, a sort of study of modern society that you're not gonna get from the Twilight series.

So, with all that taken into account: My issue with the last section of the HG movie was the fact that it was far too … clean, and sanitary, as compared to the book.  In the book, the end of the arena sequence is absolutely brutal … messy … gory … pretty much everything you’d expect from a situation where kids are fighting each other to the death for survival.  :-P  It ends with Peeta just seconds away from death, having lost most of his blood due to the fact that one of the creepy “muttation” dogs has chomped a huge chunk out of his leg.  Katniss has a severe gash on her forehead from an earlier knife fight, and one of her eardrums has been completely destroyed by the bombs that she had to blow up earlier.  She is totally deaf in that ear.  And that is all after the incredibly gory, long, and drawn out death of Cato, who begs to be put out of his misery because the muttation dogs are slowly chewing him to death.  This torture actually goes on for hours (all night long) in the book, because Cato has on some protective body armor that is preventing him from being killed quickly by the mutts.  Katniss then eventually shoots him in the face (where there is no protective armor) to put him out of his misery.  Then as the arena sequence ends, Katniss/Peeta dramatically get pulled into a medical hovercraft, with Katniss hysterically freaking out about Peeta, and with both of them looking like feral animals from all their time in the arena.  The Capitol medical staff then spend weeks physically piecing Katniss and Peeta back together again (including a prosthetic leg for Peeta after they have to amputate part of his leg) so that they look nice and normal again on the outside, to be paraded back on t.v. again and shipped back to District 12.  But that belies the fact that they are completely screwed up mentally from all the utterly fucked up shit they’ve been put through.  You feel a real sense of permanent and irreversible loss and damage in these characters that they can't ever really recover from.

In the movie, however … not much of this actually happens.  Peeta’s leg is fine and does not get mauled or amputated, Katniss’s head wound is basically already healed from some magic salve that Haymitch gave them in the cave, and Katniss never even goes deaf in that one ear to begin with.  She just has some temporary ringing and then it’s gone.  Cato’s death is still kinda gory in the movie and he does get chewed to death before Katniss shoots him, BUT it all happens super fast, within minutes, rather than hours and hours of torture.  Peeta and Katniss then get put right back on t.v. and then shipped right home with no scenes of the Capitol medical staff having to heal up their injuries and try to get rid of their scars beforehand.  It's all just so … easy … and neat and tidy.  The impact is just not even 10% of what it is in the book.

It was stuff like this that was nagging at me after I first watched the movie … I was just so annoyed that some of the impact and messages from the book seemed to have been lost.  So … I ended up watching the movie again a couple days later (dragged my husband with me this time).  ;-)  This time, I let go of all my expectations from the book, since I already knew what made it in and what didn’t.  I was able to experience it from the eyes of a Hunger Games newbie, and view it as its own entity, as simply a PG-13 movie, without having to tie it all back to the book.  That made all the difference in the world for me.  For the most part I actually loved it the second time around.  This time, the movie did not seem rushed at all.  I could pick up on things that I was too busy stressing out to notice on the first viewing.  I noticed all the little extra bits they threw into the movie to help give you that impact the book had, without requiring all the narration and exposition of the book.  Does the ending still bug me?  Yes, it does, BUT, not quite as much as it did the first time around.  They do throw in a couple lines on the train ride home that give you at least a little bit of the message that was more fully conveyed in the book.  And the final scenes in the arena are actually not as rushed as they seemed the first time around.

Gary Ross also got a lot of things right with this movie.  I loved the way he portrayed District 12 … it felt a lot like another Jennifer Lawrence movie, Winter’s Bone.  He uses a lot of “shaky cam,” especially in this section of the movie, which definitely gets annoying quick.  But for me it also gave the film a sort of low-budget quality that you wouldn’t expect of a movie like this.  It has this really odd feel of an indie with a sci-fi twist.  There isn’t nearly as much CGI in the movie as you’d normally get in a sci-fi/action flick, but most of the CGI that is there is decent … EXCEPT for one particular scene, where it is really rreeaally bad – the Chariot scene in the Capitol.  It looks like a bad low-budget t.v. show on SyFy channel or something.  They really dropped the ball on that scene, but the special effects in the rest of the film work pretty well, given the limited budget.  That one scene though is just ... ouch.

The filmmakers also added several additional scenes to the movie that were not in the book, which I thought were very good choices.  This article lists all of them in detail, so I won’t bother doing that here.  But they are scenes that allow the film to be somewhat complimentary to the book, kind of just showing the story from a different perspective (rather than just from inside Katniss’s head).

In terms of the violence, except for my disappointment in the last couple arena scenes, I actually thought Gary Ross did quite a good job at portraying the violence with a very disturbing impact to the audience like it should have, without making it overly gory.  Most of it actually felt very true to the way the book was written too (the book itself doesn’t have a ton of gory stuff in it until the end – it leaves a lot of it to your imagination).

Now, last but not least, the actors.  Honestly I think the actors were probably what made this film work more than anything else.  With lesser actors, it all could have come off as incredibly cheesy.  But Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Wes Bentley, Donald Sutherland, and Stanley Tucci were all brilliant.  Josh Hutcherson did a good job as Peeta too, despite the initial concerns I had about him in the role.  Oh and even Lenny Kravitz was awesome, even though it’s only his second acting gig ever.  And then there’s Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss herself … I mean … all I can say is … holy shit.  This chick is some sort of acting savant I think … she has no formal training at all, as far as I know.  She is the most goofy person out there in real life from what I can tell (just watch her in any talk show interview), but she plays these incredibly deep, stoic, strong characters like it’s second nature.  It’s insane.  I’m going to go so far as to say that I don’t know that this movie would have even been worth watching or even worth making with anyone else in the role, I swear to god.  Here is an example of why I say this:

The scene I'm always struck by the most is the one where Katniss and Cinna are standing in that room right before Katniss gets sucked up into the tube to be injected into the arena. She is just standing there quietly trying not to lose her shit, and you can see her slightly trembling. It SO perfectly puts you in her shoes and makes you realize how much you would be shitting your pants in that situation.  She just played everything so perfectly and true to how a real person would react to all these situations, rather than just trying to be all tough and bad-ass, which I know is how many people would have played it.  Either that or they would have gone too far to the "freaked out" extreme ... but Jen just struck such a perfect balance.  I am extremely impressed, even after seeing how awesome she was in Winter’s Bone.

Anywho so that’s my review.  My overall score is like 90/100.  When I’m in a bad mood and more annoyed about the sacrifices and sanitation at the end for the PG-13 rating, then my score is 85/100.  All things considered, it really is a very good outcome for this book-to-movie translation, which could have gone horribly wrong in SO SO many ways, but didn’t, for the most part.  Oh and I have to take my mom to see it this weekend for her bday, so I hope the 3rd time in a ROW of watching this damn thing doesn’t put me over the edge of getting sick of it haha.  Fingers crossed.  Now I just have to wait another freaking YEAR AND A HALF for Catching Fire.  Aggh!!