The movie would have been vastly improved by making the Victory Tour a series of quick cuts between the rebellion in the districts and Snow getting more and more pissed off, and leaving out almost all the dialogue on the train. Gary Ross described it as such: in a book you can have eight pages describing someone opening a door. It's fine for a book but it's death for a movie. I think they spent way too much time on Katniss and Peeta's love affair of convenience and too little on the Quarter Quell. I know this was the installment for 16-yo girls but come on, the crowd all knows Katniss loves Gale rather than Peeta. Do the tour in ten minutes, the party at Snow's house in fifteen, five minutes of Snow deciding to use previous Victors as this year's tributes, twenty minutes on pre-Games festivities and the rest of the two hours on the Games.
The other problem is a technical one: the Arena was shot on IMAX. When you shoot IMAX you consign yourself to overdubbing all your dialogue because the camera is very loud...and a movie that's completely overdubbed sounds like it was. The next two are apparently scheduled to be shot digitally because there's a lot of confined-space work in them; digital cameras are silent so this should be better.
It looks like the producers finally felt comfortable showing how Capitol citizens actually look...when the crowds accepted Effie and Cinna, it gave them permission to style everyone else in the Capitol that way.
In one of the next two they need to get a little deeper into why Snow is the way he is. The dude is Cthulhu with a kindly grandpa's veneer, and he may have skinned out a grandpa in front of grandpa's whole family to get that veneer. They kind of alluded to the self-inflicted wounds in his mouth...come on guys, movies based on books are good when they're a treat for people who memorized the books, excellent when they're a treat for people who read them once and brilliant when they're a treat for people who haven't read the books. This movie was somewhere between good and excellent. Take a couple of minutes and show Snow's Soviet purges, please.
Kudos to the filmmakers for not shooting in 3-d. They didn't have time, but the temptation to have weapons flung or shot into the audience would have been too great.
See the movie, but do so in the knowledge you'll wonder when they're going to get to the point more than once.
= new reply since forum marked as read
