Appetite Suppressant

*HUGE SPOILER ALERT* DO NOT READ THIS if you don't want my opinion to contaminate your viewing of The Hunger Games movie, or to give away plot points from the book.

I wanted so much to love this film, and yes I know that movies aren't books, but alas, The Hunger Games movie was not as lip-smackingly good as I'd hoped it would be. I think the very thing that made the book so involving - the first person POV of a smart character who has been hardened by extreme poverty and personal tragedy, is savvy about the rules of The Hunger Games, and is on edge all the time trying to work out what supposed friends are up to and whether they're out to double-cross her - did not translate well onto the screen. Without Katniss' internal dialogues dissecting both her own behaviour and the questionable actions of those around her, the many layers of information manipulation that shape the alliance of convenience between Katniss and Peeta became a wishy-washy affair that made both of them look rather clueless.

That Katniss was reluctantly playing the part of a star-crossed lover as a strategy to woo the citizens of The Capitol wasn't all that clear to those in the movie audience who hadn't read the book. Our dystopian Artemis looked like a bit of a two-timing hussy. That Haymitch had (possibly) cooked up the scenario with Peeta prior to the interview on the eve of the games wasn't evident. And Peeta, though his character started out well enough, lost his air of genial dangerousness and ended up coming across as something of a vacillating woos rather than a (possibly) cluey player who is (possibly) ruthlessly exploiting his own boy-next-door affection for Katniss to (possibly) score points with the audience and to (possibly) soften her up for the ultimate betrayal. That awareness of being watched even in private and calculated theatrics was missing, which blunted the paranoid edginess of the book and made it more of an action-mushy movie rather than a psycho-political drama. Katniss' maternal instincts were covered well enough, and these are important because they make her break the usual rules of the games and challenge the cruelty of the spectacle, and she was a wonderfully physical character able to hold her own on the battlefield with the boys and other girls, but I missed Katniss Everdeen the social observer and political realist.

I was particularly sad that the beasts used in the finale were portrayed as digital creations rather than the far more grotesque genetic monsters of the book that incorporated the remains of the dead contestants. Freaky, snarling, meaty laboratory zombies assembled by science for entertainment make a huge statement about a society so sick in soul that it condones such desecration, and they evoke a far more visceral horror than anodyne bytes carelessly flicked into a simulation.