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All Things The Hunger Games


Niners Fan in CT

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Yeah, Haymitch has a couple of really good scenes in the second book that didn't make it into the second movie, including showing what his Games were actually like ("worse than usual" being the most spoiler free description) and what happened to him afterward. Hopefully some element of it will make the third film.

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So I could get away with just reading the second book?

 

They are such easy reads - I would do the first and the second

 

You could really get away with not reading the third

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  • 3 months later...

I didn't realize it was coming this year. Awesome.

 

One of the true brilliant things about the Hunger Games series is that it is political, however its politics are so vague that everyone from Republican to Democrat to Socialist to Libertarian can find parts where their own viewpoints are validated.

 

 I was going to say that there probably wasn't much a Super-Right wing person would agree with, as it's arguably a film that states a violent coup d'etat by a socialist militia would be a good thing to happen in America. But 

even if someone was reading it and thinking "President Snow makes some good points, why is the the Villain? The Underclass don't deserve to have hope", when Katniss kills President Coin, they would take that as their "See! Left wingers are corrupt too! You're no better than us with your fake morality" moment.

 

I've read the books, and seen the first two movies. The guy playing Finnick Odair did a great job. Where did they end the third one? And in the making of, they talk a lot about how involved Suzanne Collins was with the movies, so does that mean that they're going to do exactly the same ending as in the books? Because they have changed some things along the way. Effie Trinket seems a lot more human in the films, that she actually cares about Katniss and Peeta. In the books she doesn't give two shits about them.

 

Also, I saw something that was equating the main characters to the Greek Gods, with Katniss being Athena and Peeta Apollo, but they never continued with it. Is this actually a thing anywhere? Because I could definitely see Gale as Ares and Finnick as Poseidon, and Plutarch maybe as Zeus. Haymitch as Hepaestus.

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  • 9 months later...

Saw it today. They really didn't change very much from the books at all. The sewer mutants are proper nasty... and there's actual visible blood shed in some of the deaths. A lot of them are kid's film bloodless, but not all. It still has that varying pace the previous books had, and there's a lot of hugging going on. They should have called it The Hugger Games (Bayley T-Shirt idea).

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It was quite a bit better than part one.

But there was absolutely no narrative reason to split Mockingjay into two films. Instead of getting one 2:30 or 2:45 film with a slowly amping up first half and a propulsive second half, we got a slow 2:00 movie and then a decent 2:00 second movie.

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At no point in the books did I ever think that Haymitch was carrying a torch for anyone. I thought of him as a guy who knows the Capital is going to attack him through the people he loves, and so never allows anyone to get anywhere close to him. But having seen the film, did Woody Harrelson decide to imply that the person he wasn't letting himself get too close to was Effie?

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Definitely. How much of that was the script vs how much was Woody Harrellson and Elizabeth Banks playing it, I have no idea.

Much like the Harry Potter books and films, this would have been better without the epilogue.

If it had ended when Katnissc said "real", that would have been the perfect bleak but hopeful finish. But ya franchise books are obsessed with their " show them a decade later all happy " finishes, and the films keep following them off that cliff.

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What's amazing about the Mockingjay movies is that they're a combined 4 and a half hours long, and yet they still couldn't get me to give a fuck about any of the supporting characters outside of the bread boy. The only one who was even slightly interesting was Jena Malone as the unhinged female victor who's name eludes me, likely because she got the least screen time aside from, like, the random twins who were just there to die. And that was all Malone going off the reservation and chewing scenery every chance she got.

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I did find I cared more about Finnick in Catching Fire than I did in Mockinjay 2. But he did have his moments in Mockingjay 1 (so did Gale, when he recounting the destruction of District 12). Which is the problem with splitting the story - all the work they did establishing minor characters in MJ1 was a year ago, so it's basically wasted because it's not fresh in the mind when watching MJ2.

 

Having Haymitch deliver Plutarch's last letter was a good way to work around Phil Hoffman's passing away before they filmed it. Anyone who went to see the film to see Gwendoline Christie was probably disappointed though. We had a whole season of GoT where Brienne did nothing but stare at a window so she could film Hunger Games and Star Wars, and then she only had two minutes of screen time here... and I don't think she's actually in Star Wars that much either.

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