You can leave a cinema with a variety of emotions after watching a movie. The worst of all is anger over a wasted story. The story of "Hunger Games" is intriguing and full of potential but the film only exploits 50 % of its potential.
A boy and girl between 12 and 18 years from each of the 12 districts is chosen to compete in a mixture of gladiator games and survival training. Enter Katniss who volunteers, to safe her younger sister, to be the female tribute for the poor district 12. Someone volunteering in this district is a novelty! The male tribute for her district is Peeta the son of the baker, who is secretely in love with Katniss. They travel to the capitol to participate and after a few days of training and interviews (that reminded me of a pageant competition) the games start and only one contestant can survive, which means that in the end Peeta and Katniss could be facing each other.
This story could show emotional dilemas (e.g. kill your friends to survive), first love, struggle with responsibility (according to the sypnosis the district of the winner receives plenty of food) etc. Unfortunately the movie mostly fails at it.
The background of the hunger games is not properly explained and neiter is the potential gaining for the winners, which makes the audience wonder why some richer districts have special training academies for the tributes who later volunteer.
The tributes from the other districts are mostly not even mentioned by name, let alone intruduced as proper characters, which makes the dilema of killing each other almost none existing as they barely grow on the audience.
With a duration of 142 minutes one could expect more character developement and proper background stories, instead we receive protracted shots of the woods and scences that would have worked with half the time (Do we really need in such a movie 2 minutes showing, what the beauticians do with her?). A good example for this is the fact that they seriously count 45 seconds down before the start in real time! Cutting down these scence for the benefit of character developement would have done wonders to this movie. On the other hand the action scences were shot with such a hectic camera work that one almost gets seasick.
Jennifer Lawrence does a fair job in playing Katniss. She pulls of the physical challenges of the role realistically without losing feminity. In that aspect she reminded me of Sigourney Weaver in "Aliens".But at the moments, when her character was to show despair or weakness the audience remained vastly unmoved. I haven't seen any other movie with her, so I guess it was not for lack of talent, but possibly due to the set of scene.
My personal favourite of the cast is Josh Hutcherson as Peeta. The struggle Peeta goes through during the games, thinking he might have to kill the girl he loves at one point, is absolutely believable. He tries "to play by the rules" when is comes to the hype surrounding the games to improve the odds for Katniss and himself and is quiet successful. These "changes" between Peetas public face and the face in private are quiet organic and always portrait in a realistic was. Hutcherson's acting is always to the point never over or underacting. Watch out for this young man!
A positive surprise was Lenny Kravitz small but significant performance as Cinna. One wants to say: Why did you wait so long to start acting?
Woody Harrelson's performance as a former winner is solid as to be expected from him.
As I said initially I left the movie theatre angry, because despite a good story, great costumes and sets and decent actors the movie was lengthy (especially in the beginning). To me it seems that a more experienced director (It is only Gary Ross 3rd movie as a director) would have been better suited for this project.
