The Hunger Games 2012

The Hunger Games 2012

My mission with this film review blog is to bring to light the strange, the underground, the foreign, and the forgotten movies. I try not to review new or really hot movies despite catching most of the big flicks while they are still in theaters.  The Hunger Games was my most anticipated movie of 2012 (well maybe the new Total Recall ...) and it turned out to be a positive experience so I can't help giving my opinion.  I have been excited about The Hunger Games for a long time with my excitement gaining momentum at every cast announcement.  Then I caught an CNBC interview with the head of Lionsgate (the production company) talking about how he was excited for the movie and thought it was going to be great, but that it was a big gamble.  With a budget around $75 million it couldn't compete with other big budget, big name and effects heavy book adaptations like the Harry Potter series (Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince for instance had a budget around $250 million).  Turning the books into a trilogy was put on hold by Lionsgate until they knew if The Hunger Games was going to be a loss or a hit. It had a reasonable advertising budget and didn't pick up a lot of early news coverage, but as it got close to release the world wide anticipation grew into a frothing frenzy.  The Hunger Games opening weekend broke some box office records so we will be getting the sequels, but does it live up to the hype?

First of all I am a fan of the books (insert insults for reading adolescent girl books here!).  As a fan of the books the movie was a great success.  I found it moving, basically well acted for a teen love story, and mostly true to the plot and characters.  For those that aren't familiar with the source material I think it would be a little confusing, particularly a few of the relationships and characters that are explored more in the later novels such as President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland.  The movie basically broke the story into two acts.  The plot moved along, but most of the character development happens in the first half.  This leaves the second half to be mostly an exciting set of action sequences.  Dystopian science fiction movies like this require a lot of exposition and using the first half to explain everything worked but I think the movie could have been paced better with more emphasis on the games themselves with a voice over to do exposition.  This would also give us more insight into the main character Katniss, played well by Jennifer Lawrence from last year's X-Men First Class.  This is one example of the ways this film fell apart on the directing and technical side.

The Hunger Games falls well short of being a great movie.  It had mediocre-to-bad digital effects shots that looked like painted backgrounds, a shaky camera, and noticeable continuity errors.  The camera work, cinematography was by the normally great Tom Stern, in this film took shaky hand cam work to a new level.  The first ten minutes were nearly unwatchable and all the most important fight scenes were a series of too close, shaky shots that were edited together with too many quick cuts.  This gives the fights a sense of chaos and probably allowed them to sneak some violence into the PG-13 rating, but it just failed.  Failed to be coherent, failed to be beautiful, failed to be interesting, and most of all failed by making some of my strongest stomached friends ill.  The script, written by the director Gary Ross and the novel author Suzanne Collins, felt close to the book, but directing choices such as not really developing the relationship between Katniss and Gale or not using voice over kept the film version from having the impact and social commentary of the book.  The acting was good enough for an adolescent action film with a few standouts such as Woody Harrelson personifying Haymitch, Stanley Tucci bringing to life the flamboyant Ceasar Flickerman, and Elizabeth Banks (yes from Zack & Miri Make a Porno 2008) pulling off the eccentric Effie Trinket.

So all in all I enjoyed the movie a lot.  During one scene I even welled up a tear, but like a lot of this film I can't figure out if the film version was that moving or if my attachment to the source material was overwhelming me.  I am not sure if this film will have much pop for those outside its target audience that haven't read the books, but it is good enough that parents that go with their teens should enjoy it also.  I would recommend this film to fans of the book series and to anyone looking for a good way to bond with their teenager.