Sunday, February 9, 2014

Hunger Games: Blog #3

Question/Subject: Compare and contrast the first book with the film. You can either focus on a few similarities and differences between the book and the film or on one aspect of both, either storyline, characters, staging, portrayal of capitol and district 12, etc.

First of all, I just want to let it be known that I deeply enjoyed the first book of The Hunger Games. I've dappled in the art of writing myself a few times and the way that Suzanne Collins presented her world is exactly how I like to do it. The stream of consciousness is a fascinating way of portraying a character's thoughts and emotions and I enjoyed it immensely. The movie, while well done, was not as good as I think it could have been. It did an exceptional job of sticking to the book, which I'm sure many a fan-girl appreciated, but I feel like this actually harmed the film. See, the book was engaging and enjoyable because it brought us into Katniss's thoughts and emotions flawlessly. We knew her fears and her plans, her loves and anxieties all throughout the journey. The reader didn't know or see anything that Katniss herself didn't see or know. This type of format is impossible to replicate within the confines of a movie. Maybe there could've been endless voice-overs, or something tedious like that, but without that the movie couldn't be as suspenseful and enjoyable as the book because we aren't in the protagonists head, we're watching her from afar. I just never felt as immersed and as apart of the action while I was watching the movie.

 This is simply a consequence of the difference in the medium. There's nothing that the creators could have done, really. In fact, I'd see it as a nod of respect to the author's skill as a writer. Her work was so exceptional, that it could only really work to the level that it did in the medium that she originally intended. The Mona Lisa wouldn't be as exceptional if it existed as a statue, just to create a dramatically more important and exaggerated parallel. So, basically, what I'm trying to say is that the book was good enough that I think it just simply couldn't be as good as a movie, no matter how well the creators worked to translate it from the written word to the silver screen. I thought that the actors did well as their characters, I thought that the vision of the Capitol was successfully gaudy and shiny. I thought that Cato looked just insane enough to work as a crazed 18 year old who's trained his whole life to kill children in an arena. It was all smashing stuff, but in the end it wasn't Suzanne Collins's book.

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