Apologies for lateness aside, I have read all of the books (which I thought were decently written and thought-provoking, though without any of Harry Potter’s charm).
First, I got to see this movie twice, once in IMAX, and once in regular, and the movie had a lot of replay value. I’m assuming the reader of this post has seen the movie/read the books, and so I won’t summarize it and there are probably spoilers ahead.
For brevity:
Pros: Pitch-perfect tone, with action-based entertainment on the surface, with undercurrents of the horror and sorrow from the realization that this is a televised child-murdering event; JENNIFER LAWRENCE’S PERFORMANCE. If this movie didn’t have her, it would have been mediocre.; Classy set design, makeup, and costumes all around.; Reasonable performances from everyone not named Jennifer Lawrence.
Cons: That shaky-cam was nearly intolerable in IMAX; The relationships between characters could have been developed more (Katniss/Peeta, Katniss/Rue) but this movie was already 2.5 hours long.
I’ve seen enough good books turned into terrible movies such that I’m pretty lenient about book accuracy and I know what works well in a visual medium and what needs to be inserted so that a non-book reading audience can follow the story. So, the big challenge here was effectively doing a movie without Katniss’s narration. Gary Ross and Co. managed to do that reasonably well with the addition of more Seneca Crane, and that expositional propaganda video. Oh yes, and good job cutting all of Katniss’s food descriptions, those were the worst parts of the books.
Rating: The only terrible thing was the shaky-cam. Not quite a classic, but pretty good.
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