So, here comes another incredibly hyped up movie based on a young-adult book. What is this, the third book series to be adapted based on the highly exploitable teen market? Not to say I didn’t like this book, or this movie. I enjoyed the book, written by Suzanne Collins, for its enthralling characters, post-apocalyptic environment, and violent action. The movie did a fairly good job of adapting two of these three aspects. Which one was the bad seed? Was it bad enough to ruin this movie?
This movie centers around a sixteen girl named Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence), who lives in the post-apocalyptic world of Panem, which is broken up into 12 different districts and a Capitol. The all controlling Capitol, as punishment for a war the districts attempted to wage on it, has forced the districts to, each year, send one girl and one boy as tribute (between the ages of 12 and 18) to fight to the death until only one survives. This completion has become known as the Hunger Games, and it has become a widely televised phenomenon in Panem. When Katniss’s sister is chosen as tribute, Katniss volunteers to go instead, along with a boy named Peeta Mellark (played by Josh Hutcherson) to compete in the games.
Though I did enjoy this movie as a good representation of the book, I mentioned above that I had a serious problem with this movie. The grand majority of the action scenes in this movie were AWFUL. This is all due to the insane overuse of the shaky-cam. For those of you who don’t know, what I mean by the shaky cam is that, to imply violence rather than actually show it, you sporadically move the camera around. All this does is, what I said, imply violence and obscure the audience from the action. It makes us more confused than awed, and we wonder what we just saw. Now, I can fully understand why they had to do this. I understand that this movie was rated PG-13, so the action had to be more implied to keep that MPAA rating. I just wish that we could have actually SEEN the action.
Other than that, everything else in this movie was solid. The camera work, other than that on the action, was good at showing the excellent cinematography this movie had to offer. The depiction of the future world of Panem was very good, especially that of the technologically advanced Capitol. The plot was well adapted from the book, passing over the needlessly descriptive sections of the novel and skipping to the scenes where important events occured. The acting was also very good, especially from Woody Harrelson (who played the leads’ instructor Haymitch) and Lenny Kravitz (who played the stylist Cinna). They, along with Lawrence and Hutcherson, depicted the characters from the book very well; the calculating Katniss, strong Peeta, drunken Haymitch, and smart Cinna. The special effects were nice when we saw them, including a swarm of crazy bees and a certain surprise toward the end that I will not spoil.
The main purpose of a movie based on a book, other than to make money (greedy Hollywood), is to make a faithful interpretation of the book, while keeping a crowd who hasn’t read the book interested and invested. As I sat through this movie, I saw the characters that I had read about coming to life on screen, and the setting I had pictured being born. A friend who set next to me at the film had never read the book, and he also enjoyed the movie for its characters and setting. If not for the terribly shot action, I would have loved this movie. Well, at least I have something to hope for in Hunger Games 2. I give it 4 stars out of 5.
