I realize I’m a little late to be doing a review of The Hunger Games, but I have a very good reason for that, I just saw the movie yesterday. In my experience, the adrenaline of a midnight showing of a movie influences how I feel about what I’m seeing, and I didn’t want that to happen this time.

While millions of fans flocked to theaters on March 23, I sat on my couch and started reading the book. Any time I’ve been to see a movie at midnight, I love it; but then I re-watch it a day or week later, and I realize I didn’t like it as much as I first thought. It had been a while since I had read the book anyway, so I wanted a bit of a refresher.

I went in to the movie very excited, almost every review I read said The Hunger Games was amazing and fans would love it. It opened with some of the Treaty of Treason, which I loved, and I couldn’t help thinking, ‘This is going to be great.’ I walked out of the theater thinking the complete opposite. This review won’t just be a rant about how the movie wasn’t true to the book, mostly because I can’t possibly list everything that was changed.

First, the filming aspect. I understand that the production team was going for a gritty, first person feel, but when the movie opens in District 12, the camera zooms around so much it’s hard to take in what’s going on. I swear, the camera never stopped moving. I felt like this lessened the more we got into the movie, other than the fight scenes in the Arena, but maybe it was just my eyes getting used to the camera movements. I thought the sets were wonderful, especially in the Capitol, but there was never much time to take it in, because as soon as your eye caught something, it was gone in a flash.

Second, and I know this has been stated in other reviews on here, I felt like the pacing was off. The movie moved way too fast, in my opinion. There was never a break in motion, and there was always something going on. I felt as if the audience never had time to digest any of the information that was shown on screen. It was always one scene to the next, without any transitions. Which is astounding given that the movie was two and a half hours long. Since I read the book right before the movie, I can tell you there was plenty they cut out or changed, but I realize if they had done a perfect adaption of the book, it would probably have been a four hour movie.

But it seemed like they didn’t take time to explain lots of things, and if you hadn’t read the book before you saw the movie, you probably would’ve been confused at times as to what was going on. Which is where I think the movie could have improved. We needed narration, from Katniss. It didn’t have to be cheesy or stupid, it could have been done quite well, in my opinion. But so much of the book is her thoughts and feelings while in the Games, and all of that was lost in translation to the big screen. I felt like the team that worked on the Hunger Games was trying too hard to turn a first-person book into a third-person movie.

I thought most of the acting was amazing, with two exceptions: Gale and Katniss. It almost seemed like they were trying too hard to compete with Twilight with a love triangle. I don’t necessarily blame the actors, but because we couldn’t know Katniss’s thoughts, we didn’t know how smart and cunning she really was. She had to have notes in her care packages to tell her what to do next. Gale seemed absolutely silly when your first impression is him bouncing down the hill shouting, “Hi, Catnip!” (Of which there was no explination.) My favorite actor by far was Stanley Tucci as Caesar. He really brought the character to life and just wowed me every time he was on the screen.

As an overall review, I was very disappointed in the adaptation, and felt as if they put too much of the second movie into the first. While I was unhappy they showed us the Gamemaker’s control room, and other scenes from outside the Arena, I was very impressed with them. It is the only time I’ve seen an adaptation of a book where I actually enjoyed the scenes they added. But the things they cut outweighed my joy of the additions. I can only hope they switch to stationary cameras when filming Catching Fire.