The Hunger Games Film Review

Film fans there have been a lot of adaptations of young adult novels over the years with huge portion of them being released since the late 2010's and I wish I could say they've stopped making them but sadly they haven't there still being made. However unlike alot of those YA films which are lets face it terrible (i'm looking at you Twilight saga) there was one YA film that dared to actually be good and that's the film that i'm about to review today 2012's "The Hunger Games" oh yes i'm finally taking this movie on.

The plot of the movie is 16 year old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take part in an event in which twenty four people (twelve boys and twelve girls) must fight to the death. Yeah that's really all there is in terms of story and if i'm being honest that's all you need you just need that set up then watch the kids struggle to survive however tho the film doesn't give any attention or story for that matter to it's other lead character Peeta Mellark who straight up disappears for a large portion of the movie so much so infact that I forgot he was even a character in this movie.

Starring in the film is Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen , Josh Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark , The Lesser Hemsworth as Gale Hawthorne , Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy , The Worst Charlie's Angels Director Ever as Effie Trinket , Lenny Kravitz as Cinna , Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman , Donald Sutherland as President Coriolanus Snow , Wes Bentley as Seneca Crane , Toby Jones as Claudius Templesmith , Alexander Ludwig as Cato , Isabelle Fuhrman as Clove , Amandla Stenberg as Rue , Jacqueline Emerson as Foxface , Jack Quaid as Marvel , Leven Rambin as Glimmer , Dayo Okeniyi as Thresh , Willow Shields as Primrose Everdeen and Paula Malcomson as Mrs Everdeen.

In terms of what I thought of the acting in the film it was honestly alot better then what I remember it being and please take in mind i've not seen this film since most likely 2012. I really don't have a bad thing to say about any of the cast they all do a good job with the material that was given to them , however alot of the actors characters aren't given much in terms of personality and because of that the performance does indeed suffer.

For those that don't know the film is based of the 2009 YA novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins who also produced and co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation. I've never read the book nor do I intend to I will say that based of a quick read of the Hunger Games wiki page the film does follow the book rather well with a few things switched around but again this is just based of a quick read through i'm sure that there are more changes made to the book but I just didn't notice them.

In what I thought was a really good move instead of having the scene where the character finds themselves in a magical type world and you have the music swelling up and full with whimsy. This film film doesn't do that instead when the characters arrive at the capitol instead of the scene being filled with whimsy it's instead filled with dread since both the audience and the characters know that only one of them is leaving this place and I was shocked that they would actually do that since it would have been super easy to fill that scene with whimsy but to go the other way and have it filled with dread is a great move.

I don't know if this was just me or not but when the actual games started the film when from looking rather expensive to looking like The CW show The 100. You could honestly switch around scenes from both The 100 and this movie because they both look the same and while that does work for a TV show since they have a very strict budget it doesn't work for a feature film even more so for a film that cost $78 million US dollars to make.

This film doesn't look like it cost $78 million dollars to make at all it honestly looks like it cost around $5 or 6 million dollars. Hell i'm pretty sure that you could make this movie for a lot less money and still end up with the same result as this finished film , you can't see where the money was spent in this film at all the scenes in the capitol don't look cheap by any means but there's nothing there to say "this is where the money's gone" and that does hurt the overall film.

For some reason there's a love triangle in this film and not only is it very badly done it also adds nothing to the overall film. I don't know why YA novels and their film adaptations chose to have a romance in them not every product needs a romance even more so this film which actually would have worked better if that whole love triangle was taken out but since it's not we end up with something that was so badly done it's basically not there anyway and it adds nothing to the overall story.

I'm going to do something that I very rarely do and that's talk about the main character which in this case happens to be Katniss Everdeen. I honestly feel that she is one of the better written female characters in a long time because we don't see her act all tough all the time we see her struggle we see her in love and we see that she has weaknesses that she eventually overcomes be it for the right reason or not and that is something that you don't see alot of "strong female characters" doing these days because there more focused on ticking a check mark then they are actually being interesting characters.

This film is needlessly nearly two and a half hours long and a huge portion of that run time isn't spent on what we want to see the actual Hunger Games. Instead almost an hour of that run time is spent in the capitol with each of the tributes which is something that we really didn't need to spend that much time on we don't need to see each of the tributes heck we didn't pay to spend that much time with them we paid to see The Hunger Games and also given the run time it can make the film seem boring at times which is never a good thing.

Overall while this is indeed alot better then alot and I mean alot of other YA novel adaptations out there. I still can't say that it's perfect and this is something that even fans of the film have to admit it's got a lot of faults and the fact that alot of trusted review sites and reviewers gave this film glowing reviews like we're talking 4 or 5 stars across the board is truly beyond me so the film gets a 7 out of 10 from me.