Hmmmmm....

Rating: 5/10 (15 September 2012)

Okay.
I'm going to be unconventional and start with a spoiler for the 1981 action classic: "Raiders of the Lost Ark".
Fantastic film. Within the first ten minutes Harrison Ford outwits traps, outruns boulders, dodges poisonousness arrows, deals with treacherous side kicks -- the man isn't afraid of anything!
Except snakes.
He hates snakes. He meets one, only the one, not even a dangerous one... and he absolutely hates it!
So later on, what does the film do...? That's right, it dumps poor Harrison in room with a millions of 'em! Straight away, the audience are thinking: "Blimey! If Harrison's afraid of one snake, how's he going to handle millions of venomous snakes?!".
It's called "setup" and "payoff".
And this point, you're probably wondering what's this got to do with "The Hunger Games"? Well, imagine the above scene as written by the makers of "The Hunger Games".
There'd by no scene early on, establishing Harrison's fear of snakes. What would happened is this...
-- Harrison Ford enters a room with snakes.
-- All of a sudden, the obnoxious commentator with the blue hair would cut in: "Oh. By the way,Harrison Ford's afraid of snakes. On with the show."
-- Harrison Ford fights snakes.
And that's the Hunger games problem in a nutshell. There's plenty of payoff but no setup.
Examples:
-- The scene where a contestant dies from accidentally eating poisonousness berries. We only find out 30 seconds beforehand that the berries even exists! Why not have a scene early on where a character is about to eat a berry but is stopped by a friend? Introduce the berries early, let it fester at the back of the audience's mind.
-- The poisonous wasp things. Again, you could introduce the wasps earlier, plant the seeds. So, when Jennifer Lawrence uses the wasps as a weapon, we don't need the TV presenters narrating to the us what the wasps are.
-- The scene where that big black dude (sorry, don't know the character's names) saves Jennifer Lawrence because he's avenging the death of the little black girl who Jennifer befriended. The scene means little because there was no setup scene a hour earlier showing the big dude and the little girl bonding. No scene showing the big dude forming a personal rivalry with the guy who wasted the little girl.
-- The unrest in Jennifer Lawrence's home district. All of a sudden, the civilians start rioting. There's no scene 30 minutes earlier showing "the civilians being oppressed", a scene 15 minutes earlier showing "the civilians getting restless", a scene 10 minutes earlier showing "the civilians wondering: Hey, why are we watching this TV show? The state is oppressing us!"... again, very little build up.
There's a lot more examples like the ones above but you get my point (I hope!). Sure, the film wasn't confusing and was kind of entertaining, but I thought it lacked drama.
The reason why? No build up.