For a while now I’ve been promising the amazing Ingrid that I’d write “that post” about the Hunger Games. You know—the one that compares the books to the movies and finds the movies wanting. Until Mockingjay Pt 2 came out, I didn’t think I’d be writing a post like that, because—apart from the first film—I thought many of the book-to-movie changes had been well done.
Unfortunately, here we are..!
Turn back the clock a few years to when the first Hunger Games movie came out. My facebook feed was awash with people complaining that it was either a cheap imitation of Lord of the Flies or Battle Royale, depending on who you asked. I’ve only read summaries of these works—and passionate arguments that people miss the point of LotF by ignoring that it’s a response to The Coral Island—but I doubt they’re the same thing. Fights to the death, yes—but that’s the grisly window dressing, not the point.
The Hunger Games series, for me, was the reverse hero’s journey. It’s the Disney’s Hercules scene where Hercules jumps into the green underworld goop to rescue Meg (Prim), but he fails and never goes back to being his shiny muscle-bound self; in fact, people have to stop him several times from jumping into the underworld toilet bowl himself. Katniss doesn’t emerge from her story a hero; she emerges from her story heavily scarred and unable to perform basic tasks, at least until much later, after a concentrated effort to heal and put trauma behind her. I saw that referenced in the movie, but I never quite believed it. I waited dry-eyed for Katniss’s grief to move me (I was crying five minutes into Mockingjay Pt 1) and found myself unmoved. What the hell, movie?! I knowingly didn’t wear make up when I went to see you!
Anyway, to recap the books: at the start of the story we have a heroine who’s willing to sacrifice herself for her sister, but who still fights tooth and nail for survival. At the end (minus the epilogue), we have a heroine who just wants to die. When she can’t take a suicide pill, she starves herself. She suffers from PTSD (has done for two books now) and she’s physically so weak that, back in District 12 after going out to her old haunts, she has to be rolled back to her house in a cart used to move the bodies of the dead.
In the movie, I didn’t see that weakness. Her burn wounds healed in a matter of moments, and the next time I saw her she was made up and perfect. She was composed and beautiful days after her great loss, and I don’t recall a scene where a team made up a gaunt and lifeless Katniss—I couldn’t tell that she was empty on the inside, though of course it’s harder to show that on screen. Still, to my mind, movie Katniss went from strength to strength, overcoming incredible trauma to deliver a trite lecture on survival in the last few minutes of the film. If the movies hadn’t been split into two parts I might have accepted the lack of emotional development (or degeneration, I suppose), but with the amount of time this movie had to spend on characters I’d hoped for more, and it makes me suspicious that one of the biggest themes in The Hunger Games—the eventual helplessness and trauma of the hero—was not deemed acceptable movie material.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. I think the last movie was made too palatable for general audiences, and I say that as someone who pretty much hated the last book in the series. I hated it—but I hated it because I wanted to believe the hero could always overcome the odds, and Katniss couldn’t. What made for a dull narrative (hero is always caught up in other people’s struggles, loses will to live, is moved about by other players) made for a powerful message. If the message had happened in a literature book it would have been acknowledged, but because it happened in a dystopian YA book, I think people ignored how unusual it was, and the movie didn’t manage to carry it to a wider audience. Hence, disappointment—and that’s it for The Hunger Games post. Long story short, I believe Collins deserves credit for writing an unusual narrative that acknowledges trauma, the helplessness of political figureheads, and how long it can take to heal. The movies, while improving on certain aspects, failed to carry that message home.