The Hunger Games: They managed to take a book that is written so beautifully I’m sure I will want to re-read it over and over in the coming years, and make from it a movie that I never need to watch again. This movie was not made for the purpose of creating cinematic art from literary art. It was crafted for the specific purpose of creating a Twilight-style extended marketing event aimed at teen and pre-teen girls, and to turn Jennifer Lawrence into an abstract, airbrushed idol, just like they did with Kristen Stewart. From my point of view, this is extremely sad.

One might be tempted to describe The Hunger Games as a “barely adequate” rendition of the novel, recognizing that they do preserve the bones of the story, but really this is just being kind. There is something very mechanical and joyless about the transmition of this story to screen. The dialog is pitiful, and their solution to the first-person present-tense narrative of the novel feels clunky and unoriginal, and only seeks to explain things that could have easily been built into the dialog (for example, the tracker-jaggers could have been explained in dialog between Katniss and Rue – it would have been much more effective, if done right.) The training scenes were boring and badly done. The film’s special effects and costuming are exceedingly lame, especially the “dogs” at the end, and the flaming costumes in the parade, which were, in retrospect, laughably inadequate.

The only casting decisions I liked were Jennifer Lawrence and Woody Harrelson, and the latter’s was the only performance I liked. Stanley Tucci was disastrous. All the kids looked and sounded like extras from Gossip Girl. Even Peeta, who I didn’t mind while watching the film, afterward struck me as kind of colorless and cardboard, not at all like the Peeta in the novel; I didn’t even believe he was in love with Katniss, that’s how messed up that character was!

But the main issue here is that they ruined a deeply emotional story by walking away from the challenge of writing dialog, and by completely squandering the 3 most powerfully cinematic moments in the novel. The most inexcusable is the omission of the relationship between Katniss and Rue. It’s the most beautiful part of the book, and the most emotionally important, and the most interesting. In the film they skip right over it like it’s worthless filler. (They couldn’t even get the casting right: Rue is supposed to look like Prim, and she is supposed to be a scared, somewhat old-fashioned child, not a confident modern one.) This where the anticipation and dread about what is going to happen in the games reaches its peak. This is where Katniss’ deep feelings about her horrible situation and about her sister come to the surface, as Rue slips into Prim’s place out of fear. This is where the larger social situation in the country is humanized, as the two discuss their lives in their respective districts. This is where you learn from Rue how Peeta saved Katniss after the tracker-jagger attack, and what happened to him, which significantly complicates Katniss’ emotional state. And most importantly, this is where you come to love Rue, as Katniss does, without with her subsequent death loses all its emotional impact.

This was the moment for dialog, and a lot of it was already written for them: consider if you will this small piece of dialog between the two, after they have agreed to form an alliance – I’m just quoting this off the top of my head from one reading of the book a few months ago. It goes something like this, Rue talking about the allied gang of trained killers from the privileged districts, known as “Careers”:

Rue: They are so strong.

Katniss: We’re strong too.

Rue: You are, you can shoot.

Katniss: You can feed yourself, can they?

Rue: They don’t need to, they have all that food down at the Cornucopia.

Katniss: But what if they didn’t? What if they were hungry – how long would they last out here?

Rue: But Katniss, they’re not hungry.

Katniss: Yes, and we have to do something about that, Rue.

I would argue that this is better than any dialog they wrote for the movie, and it was sitting there for the taking – all they had to do was cut and paste! Think about everything you get from this simple passage: It heightens the drama of food acquisition in the games; you appreciate Rue more by hearing Katniss appreciate her, which in turn makes you appreciate the weak, oppressed people of the outer districts more; you get to thrill to Katniss’ transition from defense to offense; you get to see the bond between Rue and Katniss deepen further, which deepens the overriding sadness that eventually their alliance must end in death; and on the most basic level, you actually know what Katniss is intending to do down at their base-camp, and why it is so critical that she succeed, which in turn makes that future scene much more dramatic. All this from a 30 second exchange; basically, the filmmakers took genius-level scripting right in the novel, tossed it out, and replaced it with a big fat nothing.

They also blow the most dramatically powerful moment in the book: the death of Rue. They ignore stunning moments of dialog, pre-written for them, like Katniss with tears pouring down her face sobbing “Rue, I going to win, I’m going to win for us! I promise!” as Rue lies there dying with a spear stuck straight through her.  Good God, I can’t even write it without tearing up, but apparently these filmmakers felt it was more dramatically effective to have Rue say rather causally on her death-bed “Katniss, try to win, okay?” and to have Jennifer Lawrence curtly mumble “yeah” in response and leave it at that.  Are they fucking idiots?

They also skip the incredible moment when the the humble sponsor gift of warm bread arrives shortly after Rue’s death, bought by the dirt-poor people of Rue’s district at astronomical expense, and which they decide to send anyway, to Katniss, in thanks for her loving friendship with Rue. It’s so powerful and so beautiful! Are these filmmakers emotionally retarded? Can’t they see how much better this captures the devastating sadness of Rue’s death? Or how much better this conveys the nascent feelings of rebelliousness in Rue’s district then the boring District 11 “revolt scene” they made up for the movie?

Oh, and I should add that it’s very important in the book that Katniss slays Rue’s killer (shooting him through the neck like a total bad-ass) after she sees Rue stabbed-through right in front of her. She is too late reaching Rue, but she avenges Rue. By changing this to having the two die simultaneously, they lay the groundwork to ruin the third most dramatically chilling moment in the story: when Thresh spares Katniss in the heat of battle, after overhearing that Katniss had formed an alliance with his tiny District 11 compatriot, and subsequently being told (convincingly) by Katniss that she had avenged Rue’s death and honored her by decorating the body with flowers. Only then does Thresh spare her, in a moment of exquisite compassion that implicitly and beautifully connects Thresh and Katniss by virtue of the deepest elements of their shared humanity. Now, I ask you: how is this inferior to having Thresh spare her for no reason at all, as they chose to do in this film?

By destroying all these lovely and crucial elements of the story, and also by dumbing-down and sterilizing the relationship between Peeta and Katniss (the details of which I’m going to spare you,) they basically surrender all the emotional depth of the story. The question is: why did they do it? Answer: to make the movie go down better. They’re creating a marketing brand. You can’t have people sobbing and leaving the theater emotionally shell-shocked, pondering their own mortality! They just don’t go together.

The way they handeled the “epilogue,” after the games are over is proof positive of this. Although they technically follow the story, they completely relinquish its dramatic tension and start to let it coast, “Twilight-style,” toward a launch-point for the next film. But in the book, the dramatic tension goes through the roof after the games end, and the emotional state of Katniss becomes even more complicated, leading to other fantastically cinematic scenes, like when she (against every inclination in her being) leaps into Peeta’s arms when they are finally reunited, in desperation to sell the fallacious idea that her actions in the finale were prompted by love of Peeta rather than hatred for the government. It’s so shocking in the book when she emerges from the games in greater danger than ever! All that is out the window here – the filmmakers were out of time, they had to wrap the damn movie up in a way that makes people want the next movie (cue lame-ass scenes of Donald Sutherland looking ominously at Katniss, the stupid, Godfather-style “bowl of berries,” omit the depressing fact that Peeta loses his leg, and so on.)

Just a final word on Jennifer Lawrence: physically she is the perfect Katniss, but I found her acting in this movie to be more than a bit flat. In the novel, Katniss has a lot more depth and emotional nuance; here, Lawrence plays her as a grim, determined little machine, although a good part of this is the script and direction, certainly. Of course Katniss is determined, but that loses all its potency if you ignore everything else about her. For me, no subtlety came through in the character – I felt strangely little emotion for Katniss during this film, so obviously something went catastrophically wrong somewhere along the line!