Film review: “The Hunger Games”

After becoming obsessed with “The Hunger Games” and reading all three of the books within days of beginning the first one, I faced the scariest thing about loving a series: that they were going to be turned into movies.

So many books that are put on the silver screen disappoint their readers (I’m sure some movies are coming to mind). Lately, though, it seems as though films are finally doing their respective books justice.

“The Hunger Games” movie was as good of a movie as possible for the books, written by Suzanne Collins. Although there were many things left out that, I feel, are crucial to the story in the following books, it’s understandable that certain scenes and characters had to be cut in order to make the film an appropriate length.

That considered, it is still hard to forgive that certain characters were left out and that some of the back-story of the characters were skipped seeing as they are brought up later and are vital to the emotional appeal of the story.

Still, it’s an amazing feat when an audience is completely consumed for the duration of the movie. When hardly any people are obnoxiously chomping on their popcorn and there are few whispers, the movie has to be something special. There were squeals, laughs and tears as the movie progressed and all eyes were glued to the screen.

As for apparel, the costumes for “The Hunger Games” were out of this world. Every single character had rich and fitting costumes that made them stand out and matched, what I had imagined, from the descriptions in the book.

The actors and actresses for the characters were impressive too, most notably Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) stole the show for being most alike to their descriptions in the book.

Although the actors were much like the characters, physically, I felt much less emotion and connection to the characters during the movie as opposed to the book. Some of the most climatic scenes from the book were underdone for the movie and left me wishing the scene lasted a little bit longer or had a little more emotion.

One of the best scenes of the entire movie, though, would have to be when Katniss volunteers as a tribute, replacing her sister Prim. The screams of the two girls and the looks of shock among those in the scene created a very real and horrifying moment that caught everyone’s attention.

As for all of the battle and dying scenes, they were shot with an extremely choppy camera-style that made it dizzying to watch and hard to understand what was going on. Even if this was intentional, to keep the rating PG-13, it was not impressive in comparison to the rest of the movie.

Through a compelling plot, amazing costumes and typically great acting, “The Hunger Games” movie was an outstanding rendition of the book and definitely left much of the audience excited for the inevitable series that follows.