See All 53 Things Wrong With The Hunger Games In Three Minutes
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Gary Ross’ adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ young adult novel, The Hunger Games, wasn’t a perfect movie, and nowhere near as good as the book, but it wasn’t bad. The folks from CinemaSins, however, have a bit of a different stance on the matter, and their latest video points out everything that is wrong with the movie. In their estimation there are 53 crimes against filmdom, and they point out every last one of them in this three-minute supercut.
There are few missteps, like the Michael J. Fox quip, but most of these are pretty damn funny. How can you not bust up at the “Anyone with facial hair like this definitely has herpes” line? That’s priceless. And there really is so much Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) alone and crying in plain sight in the woods. That seems like a bad idea when you’re being hunted down by a bunch of your bloodthirsty peers.
The thing I appreciate the most out of this video is that they point out my biggest issue with the adaptation. Collins’ book is told from the first-person point of view of Katniss, our new favorite dystopian archer, and the reader’s experience is filtered through her perception and thoughts. The movie misses out on almost all of that. There are so many shots of her starring at something or someone, but not saying anything. If you’ve read the book you know what she’s thinking, or who she’s thinking about, in these situations, but she just looks blank. Without that, you miss a lot of the world-building that goes on in the novel, as well as backstory, characterization, and important themes. That’s the biggest knock against the movie, that it deals with the subject on such a surface level, missing out on much of depth of the book.
