The dogs seemed to materialize into the game on command of the people running the game; I presumed they were constructs of some kind.
Doesn't matter what the book says. We want to know what's going on in the movie. In the movie, the dogs materialize from basically nothing and dematerialize into basically nothing once they aren't needed anymore.
I hear you but I see more and more where stuff is done a certain way knowing that the large bulk of the fans have read the books. (ie: Harry Potter) You will see this more and more with movies from major bestselling books. their major fan base has read the books. Now that I think about it, they don't elaborate on where the hounds come from. But they are real and are assumed that they just come up out of a trap door. I will say that they changed a few aspects of them for the movie. it the book it is much more sinister. For the readers...a slight letdown. Remember how the combatants got on the field?
Except we saw how the hounds appeared, the extra ones literally grew out of the ground as the other passed by.
Jeez, I didn't realize there would be so much whining about the dogs. This is an environment where the TV show producers were shooting fireballs at the players and turning night into day at the drop of a hat. Just assume it's some sort of holodeck-type thing and move on. I haven't read the books at all, but were they framed with the TV show in the same way? It seems to me the books might more closely follow the actions of the characters and give us better exposition and insight into their thoughts, whereas the TV show framing was probably done as a subsitute. Still, I thought there was an interesting meta thing going on by framing it as if we were watching the TV show (thus making us as complicit in such an atrocity as an annual Hunger Games). I also thought it was interesting that the TV show producers started random events like forest fires or dog attacks to move the plot forward, similar to what an author would do when writing a book. The movie was decent enough, but I enjoyed the first half during the buildup to the actual game more than the game itself.
You are correct on most of that. The fans of the city loved it. The people in the district were forced to watch and of course were concerned with the combatants from their district.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun."
AKA The Boredom Games. Not quite sure how they managed to make it so utterly bloodless and free from moral dilemmna, given the subject matter.
The books are narrated by Katniss, which I assume is in ways better and worse than a third-person perspective that the movie apparently has. I may go see the movie tonight. But one of the things I'm disappointed at is that the movie's producers didn't get Jeff Probst or Phil Keoghan (sp?) or one of the other real reality-tv hosts to play the part of the emcee of the Hunger Games.
The movie is narrated? Pfft! Anyone can just narrate - that's a sign of lazy writing right there. Worst offender I've seen was The Last Airbender. With as much as it happens in anime, you have no idea how much I hate it when narration is used, usually as a means of compressing the story down for more action scenes.
The movie isn't narrated. It is told from a typical 3rd person perspective, which is in some ways better than the book (which IS narrated) and in some ways worse. In the book, we only know what Katniss knows and feels and thinks. So some of the stuff is her putting stuff together in her 16 year old brain. Some of the stuff she puzzles together. And some of the stuff she has no access to knowing. Because the movie is freer to roam about, we get scenes that are not in the book, like the President and Seneca (the executive producer, if you will, of the Hunger Games) talking, or Heymish (sp) trying to work on the behalf of Katniss and Peeta. But because we get less of Katniss's thoughts and such, for me, the movie was less engaging. Some of that may be the fault of Jennifer Lawrence and/or her casting. While I thought she was decent as a young Mystique in X-Men: First Class, I thought she was not particularly good as Katniss (too voluptuous, too likeable, too unfeisty, too uncomplicated). But part of it was that it's harder to convey things in the pace and medium of a movie. Take for example Katniss's decision to become allies with Rue. One big reason she does in the book is because Rue reminds Katniss of her sister, Prim. But there's no easy way to convey that in the movie, so it's lost. So is the extra dimension that gives to Rue's death. And I probably wouldn't have understood what was going on in the Peeta's burned bread deal just from the movie. (In the book, Katniss was starving as a much younger child. Peeta burned some of the bread deliberately so that he could "throw it out" where Katniss could get it, even though he knew he was going to get a beating because of it. And Katniss always felt somewhat mixed about that.) In the movie, we see that the producers of the Hunger Games have a tremendous amount of control over the environment of the Games, such that they can change things from night to day, and insert a falling, burning tree. The book makes clear that some things that happen are manipulation of the game, but not on the level of inserting individual falling trees. I would also say that the part covering the actual competition itself was not really framed as the tv show -- we as viewers of the movie got to see things that viewers of the tv show the Hunger Games would not have -- the riots in District 11, Heymish working the sponsors and Seneca, Seneca and President Snow interacting. I would think that it would have been a better movie if the second half HAD been presented just as fictional viewers of the Hunger Games would have seen it. That would have meant different camera angles, more about what was going on with the different tributes and less of a focus on Katniss, more backstory and/or narration from the commentators.
Do you really need to insert moral dilemma into a movie about Children killing Children for the entertainment of the masses?
To address some of the contrivances discussed earlier in the thread: Another thing you could chalk up to contrivance on the part of the fictional producers of the Hunger Games.They arguably wanted to give the people a showdown and they semi-manipulated the results so that the finale was a battle between Katniss and Peeta on the one side and Kato on the other. My recollection was that they had the dogs materialize right on top of Thresh and gave Katniss and Peeta time to run. When they wanted to increase the danger, they materialized additional dogs. And it's clearly not the ONE structure in the forest that they can climb on top of. The trees and such were clearly taller than the Cornucopia. The fictional producers chose to herd Katniss and Peeta there, presumably either because Kato was there and they wanted to engineer that fight , or because they generally liked the notion of finishing where things started.
Well in the book, there are a number of moral dilemmas Katniss faces more explicitly than in the movie: how much can she trust Heymish, since he's just this abrasive drunken guy, and since he sometimes seems to be in conspiracy with Peeta? How much can she trust Peeta or Rue? Is she really capable of winning this game, when that means killing Peeta? Can she kill Peeta when he is a sweet guy who got her family the bread they needed to survive? Is she going to be capable of killing ANYONE? Should she risk her safety to give Rue a respectful burial? What should she make of her romantic feelings for Peeta versus her romantic feelings for Gale? Why should she perform for this Capitol that essentially has enslaved her? The movie presents Katniss with having little or no doubts about these or other issues. She just does what she does. I agree it would have been a better movie if it had addressed at least some of these things more explicitly.
