I have a confession to make. I have not read the Hunger Games books. That being said, most everyone that I know has so when they wanted to go see the Hunger Games, I went along with them.

It had good parts and bad. The action was decent, although it really deserved a higher rating so that they could actually do justice to the horror of kids killing one another. The way it is, it just doesn’t have much of impact. Supposedly these are the actions of a dystopian government trying to control it’s people, but it just feel sort of flat.

Combine that with the fact that for a movie name “The Hunger Games”, there’s really no feeling that the people are actually hungry. They look well fed enough even out in the districts and look only superficially dirty at best. For a suppressive regeim, they’re really not doing so great a job. And then they have all of this crazy technology, yet people are starving. Some of that is understandable, but really–if they have the genetic ability to create those dog… things, they should be able to build a better society. Just sayin.

Also in those standard after-movie-talks that I’m sure everyone does, it seems that I’ve come up with a good chunk of the plot for both the second and third book. No, I haven’t read those either. I guess that says something for how formulaic they are.

Overall, I’ll put this one below John Carter. It may be better if you’ve read the books, but I’ve always been a firm believer that a movie should be able to stand on its own.