The Hunger Games: Book vs Film

The age-old debate, whether a film adaptation is as good as the book that spawns it, usually has only one answer in the bookish community: the book is better, you philistine. Maybe we should stop complaining and just see them as completely separate entities. It seems a bit pointless arguing: a film being made of a book isn't going to take any potential readers away from the original novel, but instead give the paper version a new lease of life with a brand new set of fans desperate to know more. I really enjoyed the film version of The Hunger Games, and only read the book because I wanted to know more about the world that the story inhabits, and I wasn't disappointed, with a wave of tiny little details crashing into my mind that not only weren't included in the film, but actually would have been impossible to include.

Things like the main character receiving a sleeping potion to feed to her unknowing friend to knock him out while she riskily retrieves an antidote to heal him, how do you get that deceit into a film without some horrible talking-to-camera or unnatural-talking-aloud moment? Conversely, although it's great to sink into your imagination and bring a world to life, isn't it just as wonderful to see a film-maker's vision of that world, fully-formed in front of you. The love interests are quite cringey to read in the book but more realistic than in the film, where they sometimes feel as if they are shunted in because every teen story needs a love triangle. At least there are no vampires. The book is told relentlessly from a first-person view, and I think it would be improved if you had snippets from other characters and an overview of the programming itself as you see in the film, but then you lose some of the intimate voice of Katniss. A film will never be able to allow you into the head of a character in quite the way that a book can, and books leave a lot more open to interpretation in the mind of the reader. But at the end of the day, what does it really matter? Films and the books that inspire them are two sides of the same coin, and they work together in bringing the world of the story to life. The only truly horrible thing about seeing a film of a novel is having to picture the novel's characters as the actors playing them if you read the book second. It's always difficult (Or near impossible) to objectively judge how well either works as a standalone piece of art, as you don't get the benefit of a virgin viewing of both, but in this case there seem to be enough themes that each works by itself and together in tandem.

Although obviously being chosen to take part in the Games and having to murder a load of people or die yourself wouldn't be much fun, I can't help but thinking that in many ways the world of The Hunger Games seems a pretty decent place to live in. The horrors of Capitalism have been removed from the world, and if you can avoid getting into trouble it seems a more peaceful way of life, hunting and gathering in the wild to survive. Big Brother doesn't seem as interfering or dominating as He does in other dystopian fiction, and in many ways life seems to have regressed back to a more simple form, away from work and money and cars and greed. Maybe when I get into the second book of the trilogy I'll find more reasons to fear the regime, but right now, other than the fact that they randomly slaughter twenty kids a year for no good reason, the rulers of Panem seem like a great bunch of lads.