WARNING: SPOILERS
Overall I thought is was an incredibly good, but not quite great, movie. I think that if I hadn't read the book, the movie would've been better. After all, as you'll soon see, most of the stuff that bugged me were the tiny differences from the book.
Some of the little details that annoyed me were the fact that in the book, at the private training session, boys went before girls. In the movie, it was the opposite: girls before boys. Another minor detail was (and this is a big spoiler) that in the book, when Katniss and Peeta are crowned as the two victors of the hunger games, President Snow has only one crown, and it creates suspense, until he twists it in half and puts one half on each victors head. In the movie, there are two crowns.
Speaking of Snow, I thought he was too old and nice. One of the things in the book was that all the people in the capitol, like Snow, had plastic surgery to look younger. In the movie I thought Snow just looked like Santa.
He's also too warm and friendly, I always imagined Snow to just be cold.
I thought there wasn't enough Cinna in this movie. I LOVE Cinna, and he just wasn't as big of a character. They also pretty much deleted Katniss' prep team as characters, they didn't even talk! And think of how much bigger characters the prep team become in the later books, especially Mockingjay.
Another one of my issues was the Cornucopia. I always imagined it to look like (and I don't know why) a giant Grammy.
Instead it looked REALLY different.
Alright, enough with the bad stuff, let's focus on the positive.
I thought the violence was done really well. They had this camera technique where they shot it from all different angles really fast so A) you didn't have to watch the most gruesome parts and B) it moved so fast that you couldn't think and it made you feel like you were experiencing it right then. That doesn't mean they just skipped over all the awful violence; I still saw some pretty gross stuff.
Rue was portrayed REALLY well. The actress, Amandla Stenberg, was a perfect choice and did an incredible job. Prim was pretty good too.
I LOVE CEASER FLICKMAN!!!!!!! HE WAS SOOOOO FUNNY!!!!! On another bad note, Haymitch was a little too sober.
I think, just like all the other critics, that the score was exceptional.
Like my Hunger Games review? What did you think of the movie?