A Hunger Games Movie Review

First, a promise:  I hear-by solemnly swear to keep this review brief and spoiler-less 🙂  Since I had a test Friday, I wasn’t able to make the opening showing of The Hunger Games and I’ve been very carefully screening the blog posts I read to avoid spoilers myself!  I managed that well enough that I had no idea how optimistic to be going into the movie, but let me tell you – this is actually one of the first book-to-movie adaptions I’ve ever left without being able to think of any major plot points they left out.  It was phenomenal.  I loved the casting; everyone was great, just as I pictured them!  Actually, that’s not quite true.  Haymitch and Cinna were even better that I imagined.  And as I said, they stayed very true to the plot.  They toned down the violence a lot, mostly by using close-up enough shots that everything happening just seemed chaotic, and this sometimes gave scenes a slightly different feel than in the book.  But honestly, I appreciated that.  Going in to the movie, I was actually worried that graphic violence might prevent me from enjoying, although obviously as a PG-13 movie it could only be so bad.  Anyway, that’s the only change I really noticed, so I would have to agree with Parajunkee’s earlier review – this is one of the best book-to-movie adaptations I’ve ever seen.