I was expecting this movie to impress me a bit more, with how much attention it got. I’ll say this: The Hunger Games is really popular again, and I’m not sure why. I’m all for nostalgia, but the world was different when the original Hunger Games trilogy came out. Aren’t things bad enough in the real world at this point?

That said, I enjoyed this movie – sort of in the way that one can enjoy cheap cookies. There’s a lot missing, but if there’s sugar in it, I’ll bite.

In this case, the “sugar” comes mostly from my familiarity with the world of the Hunger Games. The overall production value is amazing, but that’s only to be expected for a movie of this scope. I keep trying to think of other good qualities of this movie but I genuinely can’t!

I’m pretty sure everything I didn’t like about the movie could have been fixed by fixing the pacing. This movie is TWO AND A HALF HOURS long. At one point I expected the movie to be nearing the end, only to realise I wasn’t even at the halfway point. In a world where everything seems to need a sequel, I’m baffled by the choice to turn this into a single movie instead of splitting it up into two movies. You could have the first movie be about the Hunger Games, and the second movie be about the events after the Hunger Games. This way, both stories could have been developed further. The romance would have worked better, and the events of the second half would have gotten more time to breathe, making the ending feel way less rushed.

The characters didn’t really do very much for me. Lucy Gray felt pretty two-dimensional, and Coriolanus Snow didn’t have much going on other than being an ambitious but overall good guy. Of course, he ends up as the Big Bad of the Hunger Games, but despite this movie being about him and his rise to power, we never really get the sense of him having the potential to be a ruthless dictator until the very end.

There’s quite a bit of singing in this movie, as being a performer is Lucy Gray’s whole thing. While I’m a big fan of musicals, the singing in this movie doesn’t quite work for me. I think you can really only go for the full musical route if singing is such an important part of your character’s arc. Anything less than that is just kinda cringe and won’t work.

I may end up reading the book to see if the pacing issues are purely a result of the adaptation to the big screen. I just don’t get how in a world where they turned The Hobbit into a trilogy, they decided to stuff this much material into one movie!