A typical book-to-movie translation, but with terrible camera work too

Rating: 4/10 (27 August 2012)

The Hunger Games movie is like a lot of book-to-movie translations. It is at least watchable, largely because of the quality of the source material. But, also like a lot of book-to-movie translations, it suffers badly from the need to take all of the background and story that you get from a novel and cram it into a movie of acceptable length. In this case, it has to be date movie length. The usual result is a mediocre effort where you can see the brilliance of the source material around the periphery, but which still makes major sacrifices out of necessity. The Hunger Games is a little worse than the usual result, because it also has possibly the worst camera work that I have ever seen in my life. I guess that's what happens when you hand the keys to the Hunger Games Ferrari to a director whose only accomplishments are Pleasantville and Seabiscuit.
I hadn't heard of the book series until the movie was about to come out, and then my wife told me the general outline. My reaction was "Holy crap that sounds cool? Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?" It is a futuristic, semi-post-apocalyptic story where an oppressive government stages a horrifying gladiator match between 24 children once per year. It is The Running Man, but this time with innocent kids, and it is much more disturbing. The best part about The Hunger Games is how unsettling it is. The movie gives you a brief background of how this came about – A few generations ago, some of the country rebelled against the government, resulting in a terrible Civil War. The rebels lost, and, as punishment, each district must now offer up two kids as "tribute" every year. You can tell while watching that the movie gives you the thumbnail version of this story. It's enough to make the movie work, however.
At every moment, regardless of what is happening on the screen, the movie's premise sits at the back of your mind. The kids are addressed as "tributes". The privileged elite take bets on the contestants and watch it like the Super Bowl. How could a society become so cruel? How can some parts of the population become so dehumanized that they delight in watching teenagers hunt each other like animals and slash each other with knives and swords? If you win, are you so scarred for life from having to kill other kids that you would have been better off losing? You might be asking yourself that after seeing Woody Harrelson's character. As the lone winner from District 12, he is famous and now part of the elite. So what does he spend the day doing? Drinking away his misery.
The movie works. That is about the best thing that I can say about it. The raw material is good enough to at least keep you from switching if off. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. The biggest problem with The Hunger Games is that the movie is completely unable to deliver its events with the emotional weight that they need. Characters follow their actions in the book, but they make no sense on the screen because we haven't been given adequate background. Characters die with sympathetic music and tears, but none of these deaths register with you, as the viewer. Why? Because everyone other than Katniss hardly gets any screen time. The actual death match only lasts about an hour on film. In that time, lots of people get killed, but none of them with enough buildup or suspense to pack a punch. We never get enough information to understand the dynamics between the contestants. Even when the movie's "villain" bites it, if you want to call him that, there's less of a feeling of relief, and more the feeling of "eh, I guess this means the movie's over now?" Time after time, I had to swallow something that seemed implausible at the time, thinking to myself "the book probably explains this better". According to my wife, it does.
A good director could have made this movie better. Unfortunately, the camera work in this movie is a disaster. I am flabbergasted by how bad it is. A major part of this movie, if not most of it, appears to have been shot with a hand-held camera. Unlike lots of other "shaky cam" movies though, it's not just the action scenes that will hurt your eyes. Dialog and exposition scenes also feature this terrible camera work. The camera constantly drifts or shakes. The angles are poor. You get close-ups when you want to see wider shots, and you get wider shots when you want close-ups. I don't go into movies looking for reasons not to like them, but five minutes into this one, I was already annoyed. By the halfway point, I wanted to punch the director in the face.
Is The Hunger Games worth watching? I guess so. I don't regret watching it, but I have little desire to see it again. What I really wish is that this book had been made into a TV series ala Game of Thrones. Then, it could have been given the time that it needed to better develop its characters and background. The Hunger Games movie feels a lot like the Cliffs Notes version of the novel.