Margaux Khosraviani's Summer Assignment

REVISED ESSAY

The Hunger Games, was written by Suzanne Collins in 2008 and adapted to film in 2012.  It centers around a teenage girl, Katniss Everdeen, who is suddenly plunged into a Battle Royale-style fight to the death against 23 other children between the ages of 12 and 18.  Psychological action against a political background, The Hunger Games is a unique novel of its kind.  The film accurately captures the splendor of the Capitol and the anguish of the Games, but it differs from the book in various small ways which serve to subtly alter the direction of the movie plot versus the book.  It seems that these changes were for the simplicity of the movie and, accordingly, these changes alter how psychological the games are portrayed as being.

The hero of The Hunger Games is quite a good female lead considering much of literature and film today.  She is strong and bold, but emotional and contemplative as well, and she reacts to stress as a real girl would.  From a feminist standpoint, Katniss is shown as real--she is neither over-militarized nor frail and over-feminine.  In the film, her internal stress and struggle is downplayed for the sake of moving the plot along, which I think is a big sacrifice to the depth of her character.  Without understanding Katniss’ mind--her anguish, toil, love--our attachment to her in the movie isn’t built nearly as strong as in the book.  This means that the movie viewer, as opposed to the novel reader, cannot feel as strongly when Katniss bravely offers herself up in her sister’s place.

Though it contained several minor flow changes, the movie itself made only one blatant change to the plot that I noticed--how Katniss received her mockingjay pin.  In the novel Katniss received the pin from Madge, the daughter of the mayor.  In the film, however, it was given to her after the Reaping by Prim.  By eliminating the mayor's daughter and substituting Katniss' little sister, it doesn’t show off the caste tensions that run rampant between the rich and the poor in the districts. Therefore it doesn’t properly set the stage for the Capitol and how different Katniss feels there.  By not showing off the small-scale privilege and our hero's feelings towards it, we cannot possibly get a sense of her hatred for the unequal treatment between the Capitol and her district.

Where the psychological aspects of the film truly fall short comes much later in the movie, when Katniss, Peeta, and Cato--the final three Tributes--are on top of the Cornucopia and the Muttations are released.  In its written form, this scene was infused with psychological horror and was one of the most powerful moments of the whole game.  Suzanne Collins discusses that each Muttation looks like a fallen Tribute, and elaborates on how this affects the three Tributes atop the Cornucopia.  While of course the fighting on top of the structure is also mentioned as an integral part of the scene, in the book the two elements were of almost equal importance.  Though in the movie, the scene was severely downplayed--you never learn that the Muttations were supposed to be Tributes, and the horror which the Tributes face at the Muttations was gone.  I was disappointed that the film lacked this as it showed how insidious the game makers could really be, both in sheer physical dangers and mental games with the Tributes.

When I watched The Hunger Games, I constantly had an internal dialogue running in my head and supplying me details from the book which the movie did not give to me.  I enjoyed the movie, having read the complete trilogy, but my mother was able to accurately sum it up--“It seems like the lead-up to a second movie.”  While The Hunger Games was a good enough standalone novel, the movie acted quite like it was a buildup to the following movie.  The Hunger Games film was enjoyable but I know that my mother lacked the depth of context that would have made the film worthwhile for her.  On the whole, the movie adaption of The Hunger Games was good, but I felt it catered more to those who had read the novel than to the average movie-goer.