Bring your own context

Rating: 7/10 (26 March 2012)

I read these books with my two pre-teen sons. We all found them exciting, frightening, involving and above all, thought-provoking. I took them to see the movie without desperately high hopes because I usually find films of books I enjoy to be unrewarding or even just boring.
Instead I found myself drawn in to the film. I thought the production - in particular the camera-work that has been criticized by many - was excellent in the way it drew me in to the scene, to the chaos, panic and fear that surrounds so many of the characters.
As the film moved on, I became aware that there were points where other audience members were laughing - points that I found very serious or moving - and I began to realise that maybe as a movie in its own right it wasn't quite hitting the mark. Because I already know the characters and what moves them I was seeing things that weren't really there.
After the film finished, this feeling continued to nag at me. Taken on the surface (as many media writers have done) this is a brutal film about children killing other children. Only once you are immersed in the characters and situations as they are drawn in the books does the real meaning of the stories become apparent - the themes of love, the corrupting influence of power, the bonds of family and so on. I felt comfortable reading the books to my kids because we could talk about these themes and see that the event of the Hunger Games is really just a device to explore them. I don't think the film really gives you that picture.
In the end, I think Hunger Games is a good, faithful rendering of the storyline of the book and I really enjoyed it, but it fails paint the characters and the situation as well as it could. The unfortunate result of this is that it risks becoming the very thing it aims to criticize - a bloody circus.