Entertaining but shallow & you'll need to have read the book to fill in the gaps.

Rating: 6/10 (17 June 2012)

Late last year I was handed a free book at the cinema as part of a promotion. I read the back, dismissed it as a teen book and plonked it on the bookcase for a day of lazy reading sometime in the future. A couple of weeks ago I saw the trailer for The Hunger Games and dismissed it as a watered down, sanitized version of Battle Royale. Then I noticed the logo and recognized it from the afore mentioned book. Intrigued, I set aside an hour that Sunday to read the first couple of chapters to see if it would be worth watching the film and promptly devoured the book in a single sitting.
Whilst it will never go down in history as a literary classic and will be forgotten in twenty years, unlike the Lord of the Rings or even Harry Potter volumes, The Hunger Games trilogy is a stomping good read and perfectly fits the overused cliché of 'page-turner.' Though a couple of hundred pages away from the end, I'm loving it. It's easy, gripping, highly entertaining, disposable fun. That said, I've read Catch 22 more times than I have fingers on one-and-a-half hands and look what they did to that on film. And Captain Corelli's Mandolin. And For those without a clue, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) are selected for the Hunger Games, a barbaric, televised show in which 'Tributes' are taken from each of twelve districts of a futuristic, dystopian America (now known as Panem) to enter a vast, synthetic arena and kill each other until only one remains. There's more to it than that but if you're familiar with the likes of Battle Royale, Rollerball and The Running Man you'll know where it's heading.
So, what did they do to The Hunger Games? Well, they cut it. They had to, because it would have been at least a four hour film. Being written largely in the first person, there were no subplots with peripheral characters to excise and so the editing had to come through losing detail with the result that the film lacks depth. I took a friend who hadn't read the books and afterwards I needed to explain some of the exchanged glances between protagonists Katniss and Peeta and fill in the gaps for him. Gary Ross has directed it with the aim of satisfying the vast army of readers whilst hoping not to ostracize those who enter the cinema without background knowledge of the film. Unfortunately he doesn't quite satisfy either camp.
Katniss' thoughts, the reason we understand and identify with her so completely, have been lost. Her relationships with both Peeta and her lifelong friend, Gale, are shallow and we are not given enough time with their team in the Capitol to really appreciate the mind games, the relationships and the characters. This is a rare example when a film just shy of two-and-a-half hours needs to be at least thirty minutes longer! Too much is compressed and it feels choked of the life that flowed rapidly through the book. From the film I don't know much about Katniss and couldn't warm to her while, in the book, she is flawed, driven, angry, hopeful and a multi-faceted character I both liked and could respect.
The 'game' is all too brief. We actually see very little of the killing and know comparatively little of the battles between the twenty-four adolescents that must dwindle to one. The violence has been virtually eradicated to the point where only a Daily Mail reader could be shocked and the beasts in the final act are completely wasted and the reason for them all but lost in clumsy CGI not at all befitting the $78m budget. More frustrating is the complete redesign of the cornucopia in the arena that is very pointedly described as gold throughout the books and conjures an image of a vast, ornate horn. Instead it more closely resembles an unpainted, bastardized Batmobile stolen from Christian Bale.
Is it as good as Battle Royale? Hmmm, probably not in the case of the film. But, particularly with the book, it's different and equally as valid. See the film. It is very entertaining, but read the trilogy first so that you can fill in the gaps as they pass across the screen.
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