The Hunger Games

4/5

This was a nice surprise. After all of the hype and comparisons to the awful romance in Twilight, I was about ready to drop this film off my radar. But the romance was actually more believable than most tween focused films. And that brings me to my first problem with the movie. I wish it wasn't tween focused. This is a brutal, violent story. It felt brutal enough emotionally, but not nearly so physically. Violence seemed too nice, to simple. This is a story where I feel brutality has to be shown, and it really wasn't. Despite this, the acting really did save it. The shock was lost, but the sadness and pain was there. And in a movie that has been repeatedly compared to Twilight, it's an unbelievable step up. Push aside one or two plot holes only someone paying a ridiculous amount of attention would find, it was a solid movie. The only other complaint I had was one or two places where it felt like the movie was trying to hard, if that makes sense. The costuming is the first example that comes to mind. It felt a little forced, a little bit fake. The other instance was the opening shots, all done in shaky cam style. I feel that shaky cam was a bit of an inappropriate choice. That style is trying to place our audience into the actions of the characters. I guess the idea was to make the audience feel that they were part of the selection and had just as much of a chance to be selected as anyone. Instead, it felt a touch jarring as it then immediately flipped to a nice steady camera for the rest of the movie. Still, that's a clear artistic choice instead of bad film making, so I can respect it. Check it out, I don't think anyone will regret checking this out.