The Hunger Games: My Review

Saturday afternoon Brie and I gathered all of our pent-up excitement and anticipation, pre-purchased our IMAX tickets to ensure us seats, and headed to the theater to see The Hunger Games! We have both read the books (Brie has completed them twice), watched every trailer that has been released, played tons of Sporkle trivia games about the trilogy and waited eagerly for the release of the movie. Unfortunately after sitting through nearly 2 and 1/2 hours of film, we were left wanting so much more.

Perhaps if we had not read the books and knew the details we would not have been as disappointed by the cinematic interpretation of Suzanne Collins' story. After much discussion about what we did and did not like, we boiled things down to: poor acting (we had a hard time feeling bad for Katniss), lack of character relationship development (Katniss & her mom?), bad camera shots (a TON of up-close, jerky shots), and changing the story's details (where was Madge? Why wasn't Haymitch's alcoholism addressed more?). I am extremely surprised that the film has received such high ratings. Not even because they took so many liberties with the original story, but the overall movie on a basic level was not that great.

Overall: disappointed. We came home and ended up watching Twilight: Eclipse, and though the entire Twilight Saga is cheese-central, at least the films (minus the first, God-awful one) are decently made. Will I see the next film in the Hunger Games trilogy? Probably. Will I pay the extra dinero to see it in IMAX? Absolutely not.