MGTM: Forever In Your Favor

So, yes, I haven’t been very active at all here. Life and all that, you know. I thought I’d try to ease back in by reintroducing something I used to do in LiveJournal days, mero goes to the movies. Today’s entry: The Hunger Games.

Oh, yeah, all kinds of spoilers will follow from this point. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

I had the good fortune to have only read the book a few days ago so the story was fresh in my mind as I saw the movie. Overall, I thought the did a pretty good job of translating the story to the screen. Things moved along fairly well for a two and a half hour affair.

The most important thing here is that I think this movie was very well cast overall. Jennifer Lawrence is a perfect fit for Katniss. I totally bought it. The kid who played Peeta was okay enough, but I will say that they aimed a little too much in the pretty boy direction for the Gale character. Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland (who I honestly thought was mostly retired at this point) all had great supporting roles.

The biggest thing that both helped and hindered was that they didn’t really do much with the book’s first person narration. It did help some of the exposition, which could get tedious in the novel and kept things moving (honestly, I don’t need a treatise on tracker jackers. They’re genetically engineered deadly wasps. Got it). However, it dulled some of the more biting parts that made the novel interesting. First of all, it made Katniss a lot less angsty, and that isn’t a good thing. Her angst was a good fit for the dystopian life she was stuck in and the choices she made as a result of that. The loss of it softens the edges on her character a lot. More importantly, I felt like it totally changed the dynamic of the romantic relationships to set up the inevitable love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. The book made it super clear that Katniss didn’t have much use for romantic feelings for anyone. She got that she needed to play along with the star-crossed lovers bit in the Games and even felt kind of bad for leading this kid on who was truly in love with her. I feel like that all got thrown out with the bathwater in the movie. Maybe part of it is that the screenwriters (or, in my best hopes, the studio suits) demanded a clearer love triangle since this shit is marketed at teen girls. Who knows. I think that part of the story suffered for the lack of it no matter what.

Overall, I’d say 3.5/5 stars. Good, solid entertainment that solidly kept to the book’s story and did a good job making us want more.