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Saw The Hunger Games over the weekend, along with more or less everyone else, and thought it was... okay but not as outstanding as it had the potential to be. Idunno, it felt watered-down and oddly unfocused, like the filmmakers decided to just go with a film-the-highlights shot-for-shot interpretation, rather than emphasizing the underlying themes of the book; for one thing, I'd almost have been happier to see them ditch the character of Gale altogether in favor of spending more screen-time in the opening on hammering home the point of just how degraded and impoverished life in the Districts is, to heighten the later shallow callousness of the Capitol and its Games. As it is both extremes come off kind of... meh.
(It also doesn't help anything that I walked out of the theater and said to Mum, "I feel kind of queasy," thinking it must just have been a reaction to crud in the air of the auditorium... and she replied me too, which has to have been something more like motion-sickness from all the shakycam. Took us an hour to shake it off.)
One interesting thing, though, is that I finally put my finger on what bothered me about Mockingjay:
I'd have had nothing against a Babies Ever After ending, particularly the subversion that the book tried to go with, if it had been supported by the rest of the text. You know, the "that was awful, but now it's done with, and I have discovered within myself the value in rebuilding something resembling a Society" ending. And it wouldn't have taken all that much to set that ending up. But that wasn't what Mockingjay did. What it set up was the "that was awful, but now it's done with, and so am I" ending, where the hero is simply too broken to do anything but walk off into the sunset alone as the credits roll.
Now, I can see where that would have been a little much to ask of a book that's marketed as YA, and so the writer may have felt or been compelled to pull the punch, but the better solution artistically might have been to say fuck it, let's just go for the R and let people be shocked. Which, ultimately, feels like what the movie ought to have done...
(It also doesn't help anything that I walked out of the theater and said to Mum, "I feel kind of queasy," thinking it must just have been a reaction to crud in the air of the auditorium... and she replied me too, which has to have been something more like motion-sickness from all the shakycam. Took us an hour to shake it off.)
One interesting thing, though, is that I finally put my finger on what bothered me about Mockingjay:
I'd have had nothing against a Babies Ever After ending, particularly the subversion that the book tried to go with, if it had been supported by the rest of the text. You know, the "that was awful, but now it's done with, and I have discovered within myself the value in rebuilding something resembling a Society" ending. And it wouldn't have taken all that much to set that ending up. But that wasn't what Mockingjay did. What it set up was the "that was awful, but now it's done with, and so am I" ending, where the hero is simply too broken to do anything but walk off into the sunset alone as the credits roll.
Now, I can see where that would have been a little much to ask of a book that's marketed as YA, and so the writer may have felt or been compelled to pull the punch, but the better solution artistically might have been to say fuck it, let's just go for the R and let people be shocked. Which, ultimately, feels like what the movie ought to have done...
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