Pass the Popcorn review

Rating: 6/10 (3 October 2013)

The Hunger Games, the adaptation of the Susanne Collins novel of the same name, was one the most popular and successful movies of 2012. This year, in November, its sequel – The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – will hit the theatres world wide, and there will be even more sequels spawning in 2014 and 2015. So, I decided to sit down and re-watch the first movie, and try to analyse once more if it's really as good as everyone says, and whether it deserves/needs its announced sequels. Like many other people, I hadn't heard of the novel until I had heard of the movie, and I never actually read it; therefore, I can't say if this movie is a faithful adaptation or not.
The Hunger Games is, amazingly, about the Hunger Games – an annual manifestation in which two young people (one male and one female) are chosen, from each of the 12 districts set in a dystopian future state, and put into an area where they fight each other to death, and only one comes out alive as the winner. In case you don't understand this concept, don't worry – the movie will go out of its way several times to explain you the rules. Anyway, in the 74th annual Hunger Games, two young people from district 12 are chosen as tributes for the game, one of them being Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), who volunteered as a tribute to save her younger sister from the same fate, and the other being Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson).
In a certain way you could call The Hunger Games a 'style-over- substance' movie, because it spends more time developing the environment/setting/premise in which the characters interact, rather than the characters themselves. While the premise of the movie – people fighting to death until there's only one left standing – certainly isn't original (Battle Royal comes to mind), it's still a pretty interesting premise that will keep you entertained. Being set in a dystopian future, the movie nicely executes the portrayal of this future – with shots of the Capitol and the districts, the portrayal of the everyday people, their costumes, fashion and, of course, their fascination with the Hunger Games.
However, the movie falls flat on a technical and character level. The technical problems in the movie include the unnecessary shaky cam, which makes the movie sometimes hard to watch, and the awful CGI (scenes with fires and monster dogs). The situation with the characters isn't much better: the male lead Peeta should have been introduced earlier in the movie, some potentially great characters like Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) and President Snow (Donald Sutherland) should have had more screen time, and some other characters should have been more developed – like the bland bad guy Cato (Alexander Ludwig) and the forgettable little girl Rue (Amandla Stenberg), whose death exceeds her importance. The character of Katniss Everdeen is developed just fine, but the actress portraying her, Jennifer Lawrence, has an unusually stiff delivery and doesn't show her true acting capabilities. That is a shame, since she is a talented actress and she even won an Oscar in 2012 for her role in Silver Linings Playbook.
All in all, The Hunger Games is a flawed movie but is still entertaining and has an amusing concept. So I think I would like to see more movies from this franchise and, hopefully, the sequels will learn from the first movie's mistakes and be even more enjoyable. If nothing else, the director Gary Ross – the man responsible for all the shaky cam – passed the opportunity to direct the sequels. Thus, the movies will certainly be somewhat better, at least on a technical level.
Rating: 6/10 Read more at http://passpopcorn.wordpress.com/