yes i watched the whole thing - all the parts
this makes it the longest movie i have ever seen.
and it really is one movie in multiple parts. it is really one continuous story that takes 9 hours to tell.
that was my mistake - i originally assumed it was a franchise like batman or star wars where they just keep releasing new ones from time to time. i figured i will just watch the first part which was obviously good enough to warrant the sequels but then i will skip the sequels. but the plan backfired because it simply isn’t like this, so after the first part i was forced to watch the other ones as well.
think of it like the latest Dune movie:
it stops halfway through the story - you can’t just say i watched Dune i don’t need to watch the sequel. it’s not the sequel - it’s the second part. the hunger games is like that but whereas Dune has 2 parts the hunger games has 4 parts but it’s called a Trilogy because the last 2 parts are supposed to be even more closely related to each other.
anyway there is of course tons of cringe in the hunger games and a lot i could criticize but ultimately it was actually decent and Jennifer Lawrence is a good actress.
as i watched the first couple parts my main criticism was that there is way too much stuff going on and i felt like it wasn’t going anywhere and that they’re just trying to stretch the story line out as much as possible so they can sell 4 movie tickets instead of 1 … but after watching it to the end i have to say i was only partially right.
it WAS going somewhere, though they of course padded the shit out of it with unnecessary action - but it wasn’t as bad as Nolan movies. i could easily make this movie much better by cutting about an hour of action from it but movies need to make money and teenagers who buy movie tickets like action.
i have to say i never watched anything like this. it really bridges the gap between a big screen hollywood movie and a television miniseries. but i guess in the era of NetFlix we will see more like this. i can’t imagine going to the movies FOUR TIMES to finish watching a single story, but with viewing at home it makes a lot more sense.
you know it’s interesting the average rating for the hunger games is 3.5 stars but MovieLens only predicted 2.5 stars for me …
i mean i can see how it’s a children’s movie with too much action and no sexuality at all and why MovieLens might think i won’t like it … but “The Hunger Games” has its moments … it has some genuinely clever twists and turns which i enjoyed.
anyway i think will disagree with movielens and agree with the average user ratings instead and give it 3.5 stars. “The Hunger Games” has a lot going for it, but also it could have been 10 times better if it was an NC-17 porn / horror movie by Cronenberg or Lars Von Trier rather than a PG-13 action movie without so much as a belly button in the entire 9 hours of it let alone a nipple. “The Hunger Games” similarly lacks gore … i am not a huge fan of gore, but for this movie it would have been appropriate as the subject matter is fairly dark, or perhaps the better word would be “bleak” …
so yeah mixed feelings but overall i enjoyed it so 3.5 stars.
also it’s a very visual movie, and it is obsessed with costumes in particular. watch on larger screen with HDR if you can. for me HDR was stuttering so i was forced to switch to regular quality and losing some of the color depth was somewhat painful for me. they shot it on digital with ARRI ALEXA XT and it really wants to be seen in HDR.
there is one particular scene during a bomb raid where everybody is rushing down a triangular staircase and i watched it with and without HDR and it’s just night and day difference. the HDR picture quite simply looked like being there whereas regular picture looked like watching a movie on the screen.
but overall HDR picture on The Hunger Games is amazing, mainly because it was shot with a proper camera. believe it or not some idiots like Nolan still shoot movies on celluloid because they have their head up their ass and of course proper digital cameras didn’t even exist for very long before The Hunger Games were shot.
If ALEXA XT is this good it makes me curious to see a movie shot on ALEXA 65 … though it will probably be again some PG-13 action garbage because no indie film will be able to afford that camera …