I saw The Hunger Games last weekend at the movies but have been digesting it since then before posting about it. Not because I have anything revelational to say but because I enjoyed it too much to disect it straightaway. Suzanne Collins is one of the producers so I guess it was always going to be faithful to the book. Obviously they couldn’t keep in every character and every little nuance but, on the whole, they got the story in there. We don’t get to know the other tributes as well, of course, and that would have been a little confusing for those who hadn’t read the book, I imagine.
At first, Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss seemed a little too well fed for the half starving character in the book, but that was easy to put aside as the movie progressed. The only character who didn’t seem very true to the book, physically at least, was Peeta. In the book, he is tall and burly, strong as an ox, but Josh Hutcherson was simply too weedy to be convincing and that changed the dynamic between Peeta and Katniss. Liam Hemsworth as Gale was closer to the original but his character played only a small part in the movie. There is little time, even though the movie is 2.5 hours long, to develop the characters and so the emotional impact of the events was lessened.
However, I am a fan of the first two books of The Hunger Games series and of Suzanne Collins, and for me, the movie lived up to expectations, taking into consideration the shortcomings of portraying a story through film as opposed to a book.
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