Contains some stunning scenes and images, but also uneven

Rating: 7/10 (31 March 2012)

This review is being written on the morning of March 31, 2012, when the initial hype for the movie has died down a little and the hatchet job reviews have started popping up here on IMDb.
Suzanne Collin's novel, written in 2008, tells an intricate and evocative story. In broad terms, the United States approximately one to two centuries into the future has become a dystopic totalitarian regime divided into twelve districts. The governing body called "The Capitol" has devised "The Hunger Games" as a way of quelling rebellions and keeping the populace in line. Twenty-four children (a boy and a girl from each district) between the ages of 12 and 18 are randomly chosen to fight to the death in a massive outdoor arena, until only one survives.
The novel triumphs because the author manages to capture a dystopian universe through the eyes of a rough-hewn 16 year-old-girl who is both the product of her time and amazingly resourceful. Since the book has had so much success and is read largely by high-school age children, it's easy to dispatch it into the "Twilight" category of "fad" fiction. Yet Suzanne Collins is an experienced, successful television writer and it shows. By contrast, even author Stephanie Meyer admits that the "Twilight" books are far from literary masterpieces.
Now onto the challenge in filming "The Hunger Games:" the filmmakers have to take a story with a first-person viewpoint and tell it in third person objective. Some reviews have criticized the lack of story development into the mores of the dystopian society but they have missed one important detail: author Suzanne Collins was part of the screenplay team and was still trying to tell the story through Katniss' eyes in the best way she could. Let's face it: no matter how educated or rough-hewn they may be, a sixteen year old is just not going to have much world experience yet.
"The Hunger Games" best moments occur during the pomp and pageantry that precedes the games. To use too much detail in describing it would be to court spoilers, so suffice it to say that the images of Katniss and Peeta arriving in a chariot are stunning and unforgettable. Katniss interview with Caesar the emcee is also striking and taken almost verbatim from the book.
Most other reviews fail to appreciate the great work of the Art Direction team in creating the Capitol. The exhibition hall where the interviews for the tributes take place shows a crowd layout and architectural detail that eerily mimics the Nuremburg rallies during the Nazi era in pre world war 2 Germany. Taking it a step further, the Reaping scene near the beginning shows the youths dressed in bland, demure clothing straight out of a Hitler youth rally.
During the "games" themselves, the movie becomes a somewhat bland action thriller. This brings up another problem which faced the producers: to truly reflect the strife Katniss and Peeta faced, the movie would have had to have been at least twice as long. Katniss' relationship with Rue, one of the best parts of the novel, also suffers in the story streamlining for cinema. On top of everything else the producers also downplayed and sanitized the violence to secure a PG-13 rating.
As many have also reported, the ending seemed flat but there's a rhyme to that reason: the makers are clearly springboarding to one or possibly two sequels. Still, if you're on the fence about whether to pay $11 to $13 to see this in theaters, just go. "Hunger" is good cinema, with fine performance by all the principals and a movie that in the end asks a disturbing question: "Is this what we're heading toward?"