Hunger Games: Blog #4

Question/Subject: Compare and contrast the second 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.

In my opinion, the second movie was more engaging than the first. I felt that the time spent outside of the arena was just as interesting as the time spent inside. The political intrigue was well represented and I enjoyed watching it unfold. In the book, the reader was always stuck inside Katniss's head and so, they were relatively unaware of what was happening beyond what she was experiencing. The movie didn't necessarily move the audience away from the protagonist, but it played to the advantages of the medium, which was allowing the viewers to know more than the characters on screen. We were privy to meetings between President Snow and other political figures that Katniss and Peeta were never aware of. This helped to make the audience understand what was at stake, and it helped move the slower parts of the book, such as the tedious process of being back in the capitol and revisiting old stomping grounds like the training rooms and receiving scores.

Also, I feel like the arena was presented differently in the movie than I had imagined it in the book. Of course, this is probably due to image differentiation in my ideas and those of the creators of the film, which is fine. However, I imagined the arena as much bigger. In the first book and movie, they gave the audience a feeling of vast open space, and I had expected the same amount of space in the second film. While this didn't necessarily detract from the overall experience, this wasn't exactly as I had expected. For me, individually, it made the idea that the tributes were too scattered to actively skirmish during the Quarter Quell less plausible. It seemed to me that because the beach was the only really safe place within the arena, that everybody should have been there and resulted in more fighting. In my head, when I was reading the book, I imagined the arena big enough that it was quite possible that the tributes couldn't find each other in the thick jungle and massive beach that I envisioned.