I just want somebody, anybody to explain to me how this is different from Battle Royale. Cause on the surface, it looks like the same damned thing.

I've read all 3 books before the movie was announced and im waiting to see the movie. it's just that tickets are sold out around here for the weekend.

The books are a good read, gives tons of suspense especially when HIGHLIGHT to view:
Rue get's harpooned. That was a sad moment. Didn't make my cry but for other girls it did.

My wife wants to see it. I've not read the books and the movie doesn't appeal to me through trailers. I may give in and go see it with her anyway if she can't find a friend who wants to go, though.

Mediocre teen novels become plot-crammed movie with too many throwaway characters and plotlines with a mary-sue as the main character.

At least it doesn't encourage stalkery behaviour like Twilight did.

I just want somebody, anybody to explain to me how this is different from Battle Royale. Cause on the surface, it looks like the same damned thing.

Mediocre teen novels become plot-crammed movie with too many throwaway characters and plotlines with a mary-sue as the main character.

At least it doesn't encourage stalkery behaviour like Twilight did.

I think the best word to describe The Hunger Games would be "problematic". It's bloated and long-winded and while it does have its emotionally powerful moments, they are few and far between. When it needs to be brisk, it lingers on useless characterisation and when it needs to slow down and give us some depth it rushes to a contrived climax.

In a bizarre distant future, following an unsuccessful uprising, the rich live in a glorious city and the poor are forced to scrape together an existence out in twelve districts where they produce valuable things in exchange for food. To make matters worse, each of these districts has to offer up a teenaged boy and girl every year to take part in the titular Hunger Games, where they fight to the very last person. This year, District 12 have Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). Everyone seems to think that Katniss is something special and so former champion Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), self-obsessed weirdo Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and overly-emotional stylist Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) raise her profile so she can get all the help she needs from various sponsors. Finally, the games begin and Katniss must fight for survival against the other contenders who have formed an uneasy alliance to get her out of the picture.

I know that rabid fans of the hugely popular novel would declare it sacrilegious to trim any of the fat from the narrative to make it more cinematic, but those people clearly care not-a-jot for the cinematic arts and should not be listened to. In adapting The Hunger Games, writers Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray have opted to ignore my advice and have gone about forcing as much content into the first act of the film as they possibly can. It takes an eternity to finally arrive at the Games of Hunger and by that point it all starts to feel like they're in a sudden hurry to get to the end.

For how overloaded the first act is, filled with characters who really serve no purpose and then subsequently vanish when the time comes. For all the time spent humanising these characters, the supporting cast who really matter and really need fleshing out are the fellow Hunger Games contestants. We are introduced to them in a very vague way. They all get named, though I defy any of you to put all those names to the faces after only a single viewing of the film, and they all get one trait so you can keep track of them to some extent. One of them is good at throwing knives, one is sneaky, one is big and strong, one is the alpha male leader-type, etc. As the story progresses, indeterminable amounts of them die, usually off-screen and it's very hard to keep track of or even care about any of them.

Whenever we do encounter these characters it is bizarrely clear that almost all of them are sadistic murderers who are just having the time of their little lives. It sure was lucky that all those other districts got to send off their most dangerous citizens while district 12 has to lose the two most progressively-minded young people on the planet (apparently). Katniss is constantly being told that she is special and needs to win, and we never doubt that she will, but it all rings so false. This is the first time someone has shown promise without being a crazed killer? After all these years of presiding over Hunger Games contestants, this is the first time Haymitch or Cinna have really cared? This is the first someone has ever said "Hey, you know what? These teenage murder sports are morally questionable"? I just don't buy that as a premise.

There really isn't any kind of effective antagonist here either. Sure there's President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the head of the dystopian society, and there's Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), who is in charge of the Hunger Games themselves, but neither of them feels like a direct antagonist to Katniss. The closest we really have is Cato (Alexander Ludwig), who leads an alliance against Katniss. Of course, he suffers from the same lack of development as the other characters. When the third act rolls along and the protagonists are forced to face off against him, it takes a while to realise who he even is and what's going on, so much happens off screen.

Something else that would have made The Hunger Games more effective is just a little dash of believable jeopardy. The camera very rarely leaves our protagonist and is entirely filmed with hand-held photography. This removes a layer of artifice from the film and is an interesting stylistic choice for a movie aimed at such a young audience, but what it inadvertently does is elevate Katniss to the level of cinematic immortality. We know that if she were to ever die the film would either end abruptly or fill out its remaining running time with a single, lingering shot of her corpse. Neither of those are likely to happen in a film for teenagers so the only remaining option is that she is immortal and everything she does is portentous and meaningful while everyone else is just there to assist her purpose.

There are some hints at good ideas here. A small subplot involving Katniss' relationship with a young girl Rue (Amandla Stenburg) that reflects the love she has for the sister she left behind and leads to an uprising in district 11, which is an all black district, is emotionally powerful and politically loaded. Themes of racial segregation and a persisting commitment to a once-failed rebellion suddenly surface and threaten to turn the whole film into something massively interesting, but then they just vanish. The whole uprising subplot takes up only a single scene and is immediately abandoned. I worry that so much of this is just foreshadowing for the inevitable sequels.

I can't but feel that all of these problems could have been avoided if they weren't trying so hard to convert the novel into a film as directly as possible. So many of these characters, so much of this exposition, could all have been excised comfortably. They have the perfect framing device right there in the narrative with the two commentators Caesar (Stanley Tucci) and Claudius (Toby Jones), giving the lowdown on what's happening, often addressing the audience directly to explain some of the more far-fetched elements. A film focussing on the actual event of the games with these two seasoned character actors guiding us through it could have been a masterpiece of cultural satire, like a modern Death Race 2000. Instead, it's just a plodding, boring mess.

Here ya go

http://io9.com/5888124/did-the-hunger-game...f-battle-royale

The answer is, they're both influenced by the same stuff.

Here ya go

http://io9.com/5888124/did-the-hunger-game...f-battle-royale

The answer is, they're both influenced by the same stuff.

After reading what it's about, I became totally uninterested. You'd think people had better things to do in a Fallout-like post apocalytpic world then to watch life and death struggles, considering those must be going on in every backyard given the lack of food... At any rate, seems quite an uninspired premise.

I appreciate the link, thank you very much.

That being said, when the first line is about how they didn't bother reading BR the book and are just going on the movie (which does have a few major differences) then it kind of taints the whole thing.
Also, there seem to be very few differences and they all seem to be extremely minor, like a couple personality quirks that make the two head male antagonists "different".

HIGHLIGHT to view:
I thought they did a great job of getting the key elements of the book in there. My biggest issue is that they really didn't portray the whole Peeta loves her, and she's just acting thing which I thought was a bit of a mistake, the people I was with who hadn't read the books didn't really get it.

They are similar in that it's kids forced to kill other kids. The circumstances make them very different stories.
In HG the kids are chosen....................

BR is quite different. ...............

I think the main point is that not a large portion, far from a majority, read manga. It's incredibly easy to assume an author hasn't read some Japanese comic book about a similar topic.

This isn't Gene Simmon's boy we're talking about here.

This isn't Gene Simmon's boy we're talking about here.

Gene Simmon's boy?

The article gets into all of that. So despite Rhinox's fit over the joke they started with, I recommend it.

That said....

What fit? I dislike that they didn't bother to read the book before making their comparisons. Pointing that out hardly qualifies as a fit.

No, no. While disappointed they didn't read the book, I didn't dismiss the article as a whole. I read it and do have a better understanding of the differences between the two, though they really are very similar.

I thought it was a fine movie absolutely destroyed by the stupid shaky camera effect. I can understand that it's a tough book to turn into a PG-13 movie, but I can't see how blurs with blood splatters is less offensive than showing the gore.

Good enough story that I'm interested in reading the book and it's sequels, but I'll just wait for the inevitable remake a decade or so from now where they'll hopefully not shake the damn camera the entire time.

Will have to check out Battle Royale, though.