The Hunger Games Review

It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to visit the cinema, what with exams fast approaching and all the tiresome school stuff that comes with being a college student. Nonetheless during my two week break I found an opportunity to see The Hunger Games.  I’d like to start off by saying that I commend its bravery as a movie.  The entire narrative is dependent on the audience’s belief of the reality of the situation, without this belief from the audience the movie would fail to have any effect and the characters would mean nothing to anyone, so watching them and their near-death experiences would be pointless.  The thing is, I don’t think I did believe it and I found it frustrating because I wanted to be emotionally engaged but to be brutally honest I didn’t care about the characters enough.

That’s only one problem with it; Gary Ross (the director, also directed Seabiscuit) clearly doesn’t own a tripod because for the first 20 minutes THE CAMERA WOULDN'T HOLD STILL!  I understand that it’s meant to represent the rustic nature of the environment etc. but I really wish they would just keep it stationary for a bit, honestly they must have had the most jittery camera man ever.  It was horrible to watch and for those who haven’t seen it, I won’t even bother telling you to look out for it because it so blinding obvious.

People have said to me that it’s done the book justice given the trend of brilliant novels being turned into less-brilliant movies, I confess to not having read the book but from the movie script and what others have told me, I think it’s one of those rarities in literature that just wouldn’t work as a film.  Books exist in the imagination of the reader, whereas films present a group of people’s vision of the film, in books we challenge the reality in our heads and reason with the text to create a more real story, but in a movie all of this is done for us and presented and I didn’t believe it.  Don’t get me wrong I love movies but all I’m saying is this film didn’t work and the book must have worked so much better.

The acting was good; the lead Jennifer Lawrence clearly has a bright future ahead of her.  Wes Bentley (who played Ricky in American Beauty) was brilliant although I was convinced he was Christian Bale until the credits came up.  So yes there were some positives but I didn’t believe in the story or the characters, very poor direction and the techniques he used were some blindingly amateur it became frustrating to watch. For a movie that has been called ‘The most important film in years’ it was pretty average.  I would like to give it two stars but that would put it in the same league as Breaking Dawn Part 1 and it wasn’t quite that bad, but it’s a low three stars, its watchable but I really didn’t enjoy it.

***