In which I review the reviews
I came into the Hunger Games franchise a bit late: I didn't read the books until New Years, even though my mother (who is not a genre fan at all) read them and liked them.
When it came down to the movie, I kept seeing lots of positive things, but I didn't read any of the reviews. Of course, I loved the movie.
So I went onto Rotten Tomatoes to see what people were actually saying about it. And I started reading the negative reviews first, and started seeing a massive trend: the people who didn't like the movie were the ones who didn't really understand some of the, in my mind, fundamental things from the books, like how Katniss is a perfect example of an unreliable narrator, and how she's a very reactionary character: not very good at strategy, but very good at staying alive in any given moment. She doesn't deal well with consequences, and has a very hard time predicting them.
One of the things that has a lot of critics hating the movie is the shaky, unfocused camera work. Personally, I think this is one of the best things they did. This is how we step out of the shoes of the Capitol and into the shoes of the Tributes. Katniss is thrust into something she's known and feared all her life, something that she didn't think would ever happen to her, because even though her name is in the reaping ball so many times, she wasn't chosen. She volunteered. She brought this alien world on herself. She's unsure of everything but her ability to shoot straight (and even that gets put in doubt with the high-tech, manufactured capitol weapons).
There's so much new sensory input that it's hard to focus on anything. And as the audience that should hate and revile the capitol as much as she does, the camera work helps remove us from our default place AS Capitol citizens. It's needed.
The three books show us Katniss' unraveling (especially mockingjay). Yes, she is a wonderful female character, but she is hugely flawed, and for a story that's told through her perspective, we need a way to visually translate how naive and unreliable her point of view is.
Are there some details I wish had been changed? Absolutely. Katniss found water way too fast in the arena. Her backpack wasn't nearly orange enough. And the Tribute Parade wasn't in an arena, so much as down an avenue between bleachers. It hardly matters. The core of the story is translated so well.
And to the reviewer who called it a Sci-fi romance? Did we read the same books or watch the same movie?
It's a romance in the same way that Harry Potter is a romance series: Yes, it happens, but it's hardly the main focus of the story, even though the fake romance between Katniss and Peeta is essential.
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