Friday, March 23, 2012

Movie Review: The Hunger Games

So, I just got back from The Hunger Games, the adaptation of the latest young-adult sensation, and it was a blast. I haven't finished reading the series yet (I haven't even finished the first book), but I knew roughly how things would go. And they went very well.

The one thing I was a bit meh about was the amount of shakycam they used. I think that's really overused in movies today (for instance, Unknown, which had way too much shakycam), but it wasn't too bad. It wasn't all shaky, all the time. There were some departures from the original book, but that's to be expected in any adaptation of a book.

I don't really want to go into spoilers, and I'm not exactly a film expert, but I enjoyed it. On the scale of book-to-movie adaptations, it fell more to the LOTR side than the Eragon side, in that it was faithful in all the ways that counted (also, it was well made) and it works well as a movie, even if you don't have a lot of experience with the book. I would recommend it highly.

So, that's number 1 on the list of "Movies I'm Looking Forward To This Year" (After #3, in no particular order):
  1. The Hunger Games
  2. The Avengers
  3. The Dark Knight Rises
  4. The Amazing Spider-Man
  5. The Cabin in the Woods
  6. Brave
  7. The Legend of Korra (not a movie, but I'm really looking forward to it)
  8. Prometheus
  9. Skyfall
  10. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(I didn't enjoy the trailers nearly as much. The Kristen Stewart Snow White film looked surprisingly interesting, but they had a trailer for the [Cthulhu willing] final movie in the Twilight "Saga", not to mention The Host, yet another painfully boring and dumb Stephenie Meyer novel. Those are going to be super-crappy.)

1 comment:

Dan O. said...

Great review Matthew. This is a colorful and entertaining film, and I was constantly wrapped up in it as a drama. It isn’t the kind of bombastic event we usually get as a franchise blockbuster and for that I’m thankful. It also helps that the ensemble cast is nothing short of amazing either, and that Jennifer Lawrence’s career will hopefully totally hit super-start status after this because she’s great as well. Check out my review when you can.