The Hunger Games has been a long time coming, the ravanous fans of the book series devouring every bit of news from the production. So now it’s out, a few box office records have been broken and I just saw one of the most disappointing adaptations in my recent memory. I read the book about a year ago and leaving the theatre I felt like the essence of the book was missing.

First the good. Loved the cast. Great choices, mostly great performances and everyone looked how I thought they would in my head. Soundtrack is equally solid, music and sound effects really work in every scene. Special effects were mostly good as well. The presentation of the Tributes is a good example of the teeter totter effects work. The fire costumes for the Boy and Girl on Fire was nailed…but the crowd looked so fake it was distracting. Clearly a green screen backdrop that’s done in countless movies but just didn’t composite well here. A mild complaint, but that kind of stuff really jumps out at me.

Now the big draw backs for me: the script and the direction. Most of the book is Katniss’ internal dialog and that’s how you learn about most of the world she’s in and most importantly her feelings and intent toward the Games (and Peeta). In the movie, a lot of that is done with facial expressions or added dialog from other characters (like the explanation of what Tracker Jackers are). This was a really hard book to adapt and I really don’t know how else to tackle it. I never felt like I understood Katniss all that well or most of the people around her. Plus, the pace of the movie is really fast (and still clocks in at like 130 min) so that compounds the feeling that there are these big gaps in the story telling and characterization. While some of the scenes worked just as intended (Katniss and Rue is probably the best) others come off as really hokey and melodramatic (the cave scene with Katniss and Peeta).

Now for the direction. Holy crap, did Gary Ross ask Paul Greengrass to do most of the work for him? I can’t think of a movie with more close ups in it. It’s insane. The camera shake during action scenes is completely out of control. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that was done because they were terrified of getting an R rating. The very start of the Game at the Cornucopia is a prime example. That’s a very important scene and it’s very chaotic on the page. But it’s shot so wild that your spacial reasoning is sent reeling, it’s so hard to understand where and what anyone is doing. The violence is extremely vague, you more or less see flailing around cut with running, a still shot of someone hiding, more flailing with shaking and then maybe a spot of blood cut back and forth with shaky running and a body that is laying on the ground. Shortly after that scene, it’s announced that 13 of the 24 tributes have been killed. I think I saw three. It was a complete surprise that so many were killed. Every action scene is shot like that. I understand their concern with the violence part of it, but consider the source material! It is kids forced to kill each other, you can’t avoid it. Now I’m not saying that it should be a slasher movie, but the way it was done here just wasn’t right.

The close ups drove me nuts too. I was honestly shocked at how close up just about everything was filmed. It made everything feel so narrow and claustrophobic. The Potter movies feel like they exist and operate in a complete world, Hunger Games felt like it was taking place in 3 rooms, a train car, a gym and a 1 acre plot of a park. It seemed so weird to me, it felt like the story was so compressed that the visual scope of the world was too. Was it budget constraints? You just see tiny pieces of things, and when they do blow things out (like the Presentation of the Tributes I mentioned earlier) it looks fake. So that just made me think “well, they’re just in a room surrounded by green screens, not in an huge arena or open area. I could never sustain the belief that I was watching an event that takes place in the future.

A lot of people compare this to the book and movie “Battle Royale” that was made 12 years ago. They share the same core concept; the government forcing the young population picked by a lottery to fight to the death in contest as punishment. But that’s about it, they exist on 2 opposite sides of the same line. The set up, story, characters and execution are completely different. Battle Royale knocked me for a loop when I first saw it. It totally embraces and never looks away from the horror of it all. It’s more of a thriller/horror movie than HG and I really enjoyed that a lot more. The Lighthouse scene in that movie is one of the most intense things you will ever see. In fact, BR just hit English DVD/Blu for the first time and I highly recommend it.

This experience reminds me a lot of what I thought about The Last Airbender. Phenomenal source material that just didn’t survive the cramming and smashing to get it all into a 2 hour film adaptation. It’s just not as good as it should and could have been.