akashiver | Hunger Games

On Friday night, me, the redoubtable Mike and

rachel_swirsky, and the intrepid Rebecca Peters-Golden of the YA blog Crunchings & Munchings went to see The Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games is a film about a teenage girl struggling to negotiate relationships and gender roles in a hostile social environment. Along the way, trees explode, people die, and Lenny Kravitz proves the value of a good eyeliner.

You may have heard of it.

Anyway, the short version is: as an enthusiastic fan of the book, I thought the adaptation was awesome. As a film-goer I would give it a B+: it has strong acting and great direction in the opening 15 minutes, but suffers from the occasional bout of draggy pacing. It also wrestles with, and does not completely conquer, the challenge of transferring an intense first-person narrative into the 3rd person visuals of film.

But you know what? This is a very good adaptation of a rockin' novel. Hollywood seems to find that hard: for every Hunger Games there's twenty extremely annoying mutilations of The Dark is Rising (the horror! the horror!).

There was actually a moment about 50 minutes into the film - the first shot of the "Hunger Games studio" - when I thought, "In different hands, this is precisely the moment when things would start to suck." But the yawning pit of suckdom was avoided; goodness continued; and thus I could sleep peacefully at night and wake to face another day of ICFA with a soul lightened with the knowledge that Hunger Games had passed through the gates of film unscathed. Now:

The first 20 minutes of the film were the strongest, I thought. Here, the director went for immersion rather than exposition, relying on visuals to tell the story. Katniss's relationship with her mother and her role in the family were efficiently sketched, and her grimy world felt real to me.

I also have to give the filmmakers props for their handling of Gale. The way they picked up on the "What if nobody watched/let's escape" conversation in the "Game On" montage was perfect: a last, sad glimpse of the road not taken.

The storytelling seemed less sure when Katniss reached the train. There should have been more fuss made over the food -- it's the Hunger Games, after all -- and there needed to be more development of the Haymitch/Peeta/Katniss triangle.

The pacing started to falter in the Capitol scenes: not badly, but enough that I could feel some of the narrative tension fade.

Here's a more minor point: the quarters that Katniss was put in did not seem to match the color schemes or aesthetics of the Capitolists. I think I'd have bought into the dystopian worldbuilding more if it had *looked* more consistent.

As for the games themselves: I thought they were executed pretty well, given the restrictions of a PG-13 rating. I also admired the use of the reality tv show frame to provide exposition, but I thought the cutaways to the world outside the Games diminished the terrible sense of K's isolation and therefore the tension of her situation. It was a necessary move, but it came at a cost.

If I had to change one scene, it'd be the crucial berries scene. I thought the camera needed to dwell on Katniss a second longer, to signal to the audience that she was *thinking of a way out.*

But all of those are pretty minor complaints. Overall, it rocked.