The 4 Reasons ‘The Hunger Games’ Trilogy Will Disappoint

There’s this book called The Hunger Games that was recently adapted into a movie. You may have heard of it, since it’s been crazily popular and hyped up the butt. We loved the movie here at the House of Geekery, scoring it a 9/10 for both the cinema and Blu-Ray reviews. Director Gary Ross did a great job adapting the material for the big screen. Given the success of the book trilogy and the film Lionsgate have been quick to push into the production of the sequels with Hunger Games: Catching Fire due out next year.

Given the many strengths of the first film expectations will be running high. With the talent involved it will no doubt be pretty rad. But there are some things that some audience members are going to find a little disappointing, especially if you haven’t read the books. We’ll try and keep things spoiler free, but if you want to stay completely in the dark then best not to read ahead. Everyone else: this will give you realistic expectations.

4. They’ve Split the Third Movie into Two

In what has become known in industry circles as the ‘Fuck You, We’re Going to Take Your Money’ marketing strategy, studios have been needlessly chopping final chapters of hit franchises in half. This does nothing to serve the story or even audience enjoyment, but it does mean that the dedicated fans who have been supporting the franchise so far wind up having to shell out for an extra cinema ticket. Sometimes this does allow the film-makers to include content that would otherwise not make the cut, and other times it involves padding out the movie with a half hour of wedding speeches that only the most fervently fanatic fan would try and defend.

Hunger Games: Mockingjay does not have enough material for two full length blockbuster films without some serious padding. In fact, once you strip away the inner monologues that can’t be translated to film and the amount of time they spent sitting on a train in Catching Fire, one could realistically collapse the two into two films by shifting the ending of the second book up the timeline of the second movie and covering the opening chapters of the third book in the second movie. This would be easy, especially as…

3. The Second Movie Doesn’t Have an Ending

When you read the second book in the series, Catching Fire, you get to a point during the final chapters where you notice that there’s very few pages left yet there’s a buttload of unresolved threads and characters hanging awkwardly around. Expecting a snappy little resolution you read on and suddenly…you’ve run out of pages. The story is not over. It picks up immediately in the third book, Mockingjay. Whilst almost a year passes between the first and second books the rest of the series is essentially one long, unbroken narrative split into two books to prevent our thumbs falling off when we’re trying to read it on the train.

This is going to come as a shock for cinema goers who haven’t read the books. Even when we know that a movie is the second part of a trilogy we expect some kind of resolution or climax to take place so we can go home satisfied, picking the popcorn crumbs off our shirts. The ending of Catching Fire as it currently stands will leave people grumbling about having to wait a year to see the next scene.

2. Katniss Fails to Grow into a Strong Independent Character

From the set up in The Hunger Games one would assume that the character arc for Katniss involves her becoming the leader of a rebellion against the corrupt government, becoming one of the few decent strong female characters to grace the silver screen. Sadly this may fail to occur for many people as Katniss frequently finds herself under the manipulations of greater powers. The ending of her first outing suggests that the President is gearing up to exact terrible revenge on Katniss, but instead he sits on his hands while tensions build before trying to use her as a figurehead for his propaganda push. This is a situation she winds up in often, never quite stepping up to the leadership role that is almost expected of her.

1. There isn’t a Hunger Games in ‘Mockingjay’

Needless to say, without the detailed accounts of the actual Hunger Games tournaments there’s very little to make this trilogy stand out. The tales of survival and forced murder are brutal, thrilling and fantastically imaginative. Catching Fire ups the ante by dropping Katniss and Peeta back into a tournament in which the competitors are all former champions, making for a much more deadly bout. The vicious arena brings more dangers into the fray with a diabolical clock based mechanism, and should be one of the high points of the sequel.

The two parts of Mockingjay is strangely lacking a Hunger Games tournament. It makes sense from a narrative stand point but from an audience viewpoint they’ve stripped away the biggest selling point of the series for half the movies in the franchise. When war breaks out some of the ideas from the Hunger Games are carried across when the booby traps, such as tracker jackers, get deployed into combat against the rebels. If there’s one thing that will leave cinema-goers disappointed by the trilogy (quadrilogy?) as a whole, it will be this.

Now that our expectations are set we can enjoy the next couple of movies. Here’s looking forward to them!