by Elise Van Dam
If you like action and adventure then it is time to head to the theaters to see the movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ young adult novel “The Hunger Games.” Like the novel, the film follows the plot of a post-apocalyptic America where the government randomly chooses 12 teenage boys and 12 girls to fight to the death in a state-of-the-art arena. The plot is focused around a 16-year-old girl named Katniss Everdeen and her experiences as a player in the games.
The movie starts a bit slow with the picking of the participants and the training leading up to the game, but once the game actually starts the plot picks up speed. Along with the speed of the plot, the casting directors did well with picking actors and actresses.
“I felt like the actors did a great job and the casting was awesome, especially with the characters of Effie Trinket and Haymitch Abernathy,” junior Anna Case said.
The main characters are played by well-known actors. Katniss Everdeen was played by Jennifer Lawrence, who also starred as Mystique in “X-Men: First Class”; Gale Hawthorne was played by Liam Hemsworth, who also acted in Nicholas Sparks’ “The Last Song”; and the TV host Caesar Flickerman was performed by Stanley Tucci, who also starred in “Captain America” and “The Devil Wears Prada”.
People either like when movie adaptations follow the books or they do not care. I fall into the category of people that like the novel and movie for their own entities, although I felt that the film followed the movie well. The settings of the different scenes looked similar to how I imagined them while reading the book. I also felt many of the same emotions from the book that I experienced in the movie, from frustration about people having to fight to the death to happiness when something good happened to Katniss.
Freshman Andrew Wheeler said he likes it when the movie adaptation follows the novel.
“In a broad sense I felt that the movie matched the book,“ Wheeler said. “They did a good job of taking a lot of plot and fitting it into a two-hour movie.”
The directors stayed true to the crucial scenes of the novel. They portrayed the sorrow and effects of never seeing a loved one again when Katniss had to say goodbye to her family.
The scenes during the game effectively portrayed the tactics, hardships and frustrations of Katniss that the author depicted in the novel. I would recommend this movie to anyone who likes action and adventure but is also all right with feeling uncomfortable at times with the violence. But it is definitely worth seeing on the silver screen.
Contact Elise Van Dam at evandam13@my.whitworth.edu.