Jennifer Lawrence portrays Katniss Everdeen in a scene from “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.” AP/Lionsgate photo by Murray Close.
I am going to speak what may appear to be heresy to some people here: it does not matter if a movie was as good as a book or stays true to the book.
Yes, it can appear to matter, and at one point, it seemed to me it did. You read a book, you go to see the movie version, you want the pages to unfold before you onscreen like they did in the book.
Here’s the problem: movies are not books, and books are not movies. They each have their own ways of telling stories that are unique to themselves. Books use words that create images in your head, unbounded by space, time, or anything except your imaginations. Movies are visual stories told by writers, actors, directors, designers and other specialists that are very confined to what they create on the screen. In many ways, they do the imagining for us, though in their best executions, movies spark our imaginations.
But books and movies are not the same, so to argue a movie is not as good as the book is an inherently unfair argument. A movie cannot be a book, and vice versa. The complaints came to the forefront recently with the latest installment of The Hunger Games series, Mockingjay, Part 1. As reviews came out saying the movie couldn’t stand on its own, was dark and somewhat lifeless, readers piled on as they can now do in the social media age complaining the critics didn’t get it because they had not read the book.
But that doesn’t matter.
I haven’t read the book. I probably won’t. I am more of a nonfiction reader. I have other things to do. But I have liked the first two Hunger Games movies. I will go see Mockingjay, Part 1, for the cinematic experience. What I am reading tells me I may be disappointed by a movie that comes across as a big “and” between Catching Fire and Mockingjay, Part 2. That sometimes happens in series. For all the devotion to The Empire Strikes Back (1980), which was a very well done movie, it was an “and” between Star Wars (1977) and Return of the Jedi (1983). It really did not stand alone as a movie.
That seems to be the same sort of criticism Mockingjay, Part 1 is getting: it appears to be a bridge between two movies, not an entity unto itself. You know what? If you read and loved Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay novel, those movie reviews in no way invalidate your experience of the novel. And even if you love the movie, a critic’s review does not invalidate that either. It’s all opinion, and yours is really the most important to you.
But also, don’t jam a critic for what you perceive as his or her lack of knowledge about a book when they are reviewing a movie. That’s not their job. Their job is to review a movie. Did it work as a movie? What did it accomplish and not accomplish as a movie? If the critic has read the book, he or she may mention how it compares, but that is not the film critic’s job. The question a movie critic is there to answer is, how was the movie?
If that’s what you disagree with, debate on! But leave your literary snobbery as the box office.
