a near perfect adaptation

Rating: 8/10 (22 March 2012)

i've seen it twice now. overall it was a very good adaptation as far as story structure goes. they changed a few things but unlike some popular movie adaptations where you question the change, for HG it makes a lot of sense. it tightened the story at the right places. sure you'll miss the characters/ scenes that didn't make it in but it wasn't something that crippled the significance of the story.
also the additional (non-book) scenes are very good, i highly appreciated them, the way they fleshed out Seneca Crane's role, and started to feature President Snow more as the true dangerous menace that he is. plus the inception of the uprising at district 11 which will foreshadow events of Catching Fire and Mockingjay is very well done, in fact it didn't stick out as odd, its more like its expected that it be happening then instead of something new when Katniss hears about it in CF.
acting wise everybody is a 10-- nay 11-- across the board. even the smallest bit parts wasn't something done half-heatedly. physically they may not have been an exact match with the book description but they lived and breathed their personas to a T. it didn't matter if Katniss wasn't small and scrawny or that Haymitch didn't have a curly brown mess on his head, the fact is that they embody that all elusive aura of the characters, convincing us that for the next 2 and half hours, our beloved book characters are alive in all their glory up on the big screen.
if there's one thing i really appreciate about how this movie was adapted it was that Gary Ross managed to have us see and hear through Katniss's POV several times during the film, whilst not sacrificing the valuable 3rd person perspective that adds dimension far beyond Katniss's perspective.
of course like any adaptation its not without any gripes, although surprisingly they were something more trivial compared to problems from other adaptations. i will say i was a bit disappointed with the Capitol's appearance as a whole. there's something about it thats sorely lacking in its visualization compared to how it was in the books. perhaps it was the lack of the glorifying, flashy, stylized excess that was one of the most obvious quality of book!Capitol. the strange thing about the film version, is that all the elements are there-- the grandeur of a futuristic city, the near-grotesque beauty of the Capitol residents, the incredibly progressive technology, but for some reason they failed to gel together for film!Capitol. to me, it didn't look like it was much different from the squalor of District 12, they just hid it behind fake facades, garish clothes and heavy make-up.
perhaps it was Gary Ross' way of purposely not glorifying something that has misled so many people in real life (because he did go through the effort of showing a "behinds the scenes" setting versus what Panem residents see on screen) but judging this on the merits of visual storytelling, that sparkly grandeur was important for the Capitol because it emphasizes the incredible gap between its life versus life at District 12.
btw, the rating for this film is PG13? eh, could've survived on a PG rating. they've downplayed a lot of the blood and gore from the story-- and the HG book isn't even that intense in terms of violence-in-books scale. for those looking forward to Cato's end the film version was a bit of a let down. he barely got mangled i think.
oh and some scenes with a hand-held camera was too much. too shaky Gary! yes it should feel like it a war zone but good heavens i didn't need to feel sea-sick for some of them.
parting sentiments: JHutch is Peeta --this is epic and scary in the McKellen-is-Gandalf proportions. that is one UGLY Cornucopia. poor pit bull terriers, they will get even less love after this. watch out for Catching Fire foreshadowing on Peeta (one of the shockers i totally welcomed haha!)