The Hunger Games Movie
We watched The Hunger Games yesterday. As part of our no-computer, get-out-of-the-house, get-away-from-the-work day of fun. Or something like that.
And I really, really wanted to like the show. I liked the book enough (although, I think I might have benefited from not really grasping how much of a /thing/ it was. Had I known, I would probably have had my expectations all skewed and might not have liked it as much as I did). And then I thought the critics and fans were favorable, so I convinced the hubby to go watch with me.
Warning: There be allusions to spoilers ahead. I was... very, very underwhelmed.
What seduced me in the first book to go on reading the second and third books was sorely missing from this movie adaptation, and I couldn't figure out why at first. I kept wondering if the movie was hacked by our censorship board to result in a disjointed, unengaging movie. There were scenes that should have, could have invoked more emotion and pulled the audience in, but instead, I felt like I was watching a first cut of the scene--that hadn't been edited, polished, or completed yet.
It wasn't until I'd talked to the hubby after and read reviews after (by critics who didn't like it as much as I thought they did?) that I realized I was expecting a more edgier, a more brutal, a more take-my-breath away film than the washed out film that might have suffered because it had to meet the PG-13 rating. It's odd how a book that was very much R-rated could be for a young readership, but when turned into a movie, it had to be sanitized a bit.
I also think it was missing the benefit of Katniss' voice. It was one of the things that made me leery about reading the book. First person voice is always tricky for me; so much depends on me liking the personality of the narrator, and sometimes I just don't. At first, I wasn't sure I liked Katniss--I found her long-winded in the beginning, but somehow, through her eyes, her thoughts and feelings... the story made a connection.
That connection was missing from the movie, and without it, the movie lacked depth.
In fact, there were scenes where I half expected a voiceover from Katniss, instead all I got was... silence (!) and jerky camera work. Why? I don't get the style. Especially in the beginning (the opening scenes and the Reaping--especially the Reaping), where the silence and jerky camera work has no emotional weight to it, I kept waiting for something to entice me to care. It like someone just forgot to add something to the film.
The depth that Katniss's narration lent the book might not have worked in a movie medium, but it could have easily been substituted by other tools or means suitable for a movie. Music. Creative camera angles/transitions/movements. Instead, it was just either not there or done very poorly.
An R-rating might have helped, too, with the tension and brutality of the hunger games. You have children fighting each other to the /death/. How can you not feel tensed and brutally assaulted by the end of the movie? How can you not feel a little shocked and stunned, and maybe emotionally wrung at the end? .... Because maybe only then, will the audience recover in a way that makes them want to think back and dissect all the nuances of the story, the characters, the emotions, etc. How awesome would that kind of movie have been?
It's a movie, for goodness sake. A medium visual and auditory ...so why did they rely on jerky movements and silence? Why were the CGI effects (for such a potentially huge franchise) so lackluster. (The tribute parade could have been an awesome opportunity to showcase all the various costumes [maybe even endear us to the other characters?!] and then hit us with an awesome fire display. I was expecting flames to engulf Katniss and Peeta like fire dragons, licking and curling around the bodies. Instead, we got... Eh? Fake flames on shoulders?)
One of the scenes I was looking forward to was the start of the games, where all the tributes stand on their marks waiting for the games to begin and have to make a choice to go for the stash of weapons and supplies in the middle of the field or not. Many do only to be slaughtered by the stronger contestants. It's chaos and mayhem and blood and gore.
We barely see any of that. We see enough to know that there's killing and children are dying, but we feel nothing. No horror, no tension, no riveting I-can't-believe-this-is-happening emotions. It seems more like a slightly out of control scuffle among children where a teacher needs to go and dispense discipline and scolding, not a life-or-death situation that should be terrifying.
The tributes, too, are almost caricatures of children. They lack any real personality to them--nothing to entice us to feel for them when they die.
Death is treated almost as off-scene events. Even when Katniss makes her first kill--we don't see the guy shot. We don't even see him fall. Shouldn't Katniss at least spend a moment, even if a surreal moment, to /watch/ her very first kill--a murder of another human being? Something she'd foreshadowed in an earlier scene about having only hunted animals, not humans... And how much more powerful would it have been if we'd--along with Katniss--spent that breathtaking moment staring at that first kill--if only just for a few seconds, only to turn and find Rue shot. [Memory-sharp readers might remember that this was not the sequence of events in the book; Katniss actually sees Rue shot before (deliberately) killing the other character. But IMHO, either sequence could have worked if only it invoked SOME emotion.]
A reviewer said he was puzzled to see all the opportunities that the movie had to make a great impact...only for the movie makers to pass it up over and over again, and I think this is what he meant.
Personally, I can't help feeling that it was such waste. The actors were decent, I think, and a movie adaptation of the story could have worked. But lacking direction and the willingness to take risks with the movie, all of it resulted in a lackluster movie for me. Meh. What a waste.
EDIT: And then I found these fan-made movies based on the Hunger Games. ZOMG.
Hunger Games: Finnick and Annie Web Series - a fan-made movie on the backstory of two characters you meet in the second book, Catching Fire.
Click to viewHUNGER GAMES: THE SECOND QUARTER QUELL - a fan-made movie based the events of The Second Quarter Quell/The 50th Hunger Games -- during which Haymitch (Katniss and Peeta's mentor) won. This is probably rated R (and more along the lines of what I expected the actual Hunger Games movie to have been like. Le sigh.)