The movie is SO GOOD, but you're watching it and going, "How on earth do you understand this at ALL without having read the books???????"
For example, Cinna and Katniss had about 3 minutes together on screen, but I had ALL THE FEELINGS because even with those 3 minutes you could see how much she trusted him in this world beyond her ken.
A lot of the changes were so minor I didn't care, but some of them did change the flow of the movie a lot. For example, the fact that no one explicitly told Katniss to pretend to be friends or pretend to be united with Peeta pre-games. In the book, I loved that tension where they literally are pretending to be friends to the point of pretending to laugh and pretending that they're having fun. Which made his "I want to be trained alone" thing more hurtful when it came. Here, I wasn't quite sure why she liked Peeta at all, because he was so bland and they had so little time together.
Additionally Haymitch in the book was so much more interesting because of how much he and Katniss explicitly detested each other, but how they managed to communicate without notes during the games.
On the other hand, the movie did a lot of things nearly better than the books, like showing us bits of the outside, and the riot at Rue's death nearly killed me dead.
I loved it, don't get me wrong, but there's some tension between what I knew because of reading the books and what was actually on screen.
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