Hope Part 2 Redeems Part 1

Rating: 6/10 (25 November 2014)

What to say here? I was reluctant to review this one because I was hoping that after a week of thinking about this movie it would maybe get better or maybe I would want to see it again. No such luck. The same director of the last "Hunger Games" film "Catching Fire" is back again, only this time...the character development is not as present, the action is not as intense...and it's just...lacking. It does seem to do an okay job of depicting what happened in the book, it's just that the first half of the book is not that interesting as far as a movie goes. I don't think it's that different than the book, it is just difficult to do it justice on the screen as a lot of the first half deals with internal conflict and darkness within Katniss, an area that can be difficult to adapt, although I do think it could have been dealt with better than this. I'm not sure Gary Ross (director of the first Hunger Games film) would have done a better job necessarily, but we'll never know. It seems that the studio always wanted to stretch the final book over two films so it was going to be inevitable as far as the adaptation goes. It just would have been better if we would have been privy to the second half of the book at the same time, here's hoping the follow up this summer is a slam dunk.