I couldn't have done any better... 5/10 ?!

Rating: Null/10 (24 March 2012)

This review is from a 26 year old who has read the book.
I don't want to seem to jump on the band waggon of people who say's "its not as good as the book" as this was going to be guaranteed.
Therefore, I will start with the good. Well, one good point really. I think all the readers can agree that Katniss is a very complicated character to play, with multitude of emotions. And I think that Jennifer Lawrence did a good job, considering screenplay she had to work with. This is probably the main positive of the movie.
Now the negatives. For me (personally), the lack of gore and fighting (and hence making it a 12A instead of a 15) wasn't the problem. I didn't like the book because of the gore. I liked the book because it made me feel happy, sad, anger and compassion at different times. It made me care about the characters and what happened to them... how a good book should. This is where the movie failed for me. After asking my friends about the movie (who haven't read the book), they said that they found that they didn't care about the characters during the movie, whether if they died or survived. I think this hits the nail on the head.
A book can achieve a connection between the reader and the characters by creating depth to the characters and more importantly richness of the relationships between characters. By doing this, the reader can relate to the internal feelings of the characters at major situations throughout the book. Hence, the reader will find themselves wanting good things to happen to the main characters such as Katniss and Peeta, and feel emotional pain when bad things happen to them. But this takes pages and pages of emotive descriptions, which is hard to portray on screen. Therefore, the writers had to balance between the depths of characters/relationships with the breadth of storyline within the given time frame, which was probably by far the biggest hurdle. This is where I sympathise with the screen writers. The movie was already 2 hours and 20 minutes long. It would over have to be a lot longer to do achieve this balance. But, obviously that is way too long for a movie. Therefore, as a movie this was destined to fail... maybe as a TV series where there is more time to develop this connection with the characters could have worked better. Who knows?