It’s also massively enjoyable to watch Donald Sutherland being creepy as all get out as Snow, and it’s great to see Crane’s character rounded out a little bit. These insights into the people running the show are actually really valuable, and let us see for ourselves – outside of Katniss’s limited understanding – how Panem works. So we get to spend time with President Snow in his rose garden, doling out advice (and thinly veiled threats) to Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane. We get to see things that Katniss isn’t privy to, and the world of Panem is opened up to us a little bit. Those scenes are great, and a lot of the stuff we’ve lost isn’t all that important – but some of the missing stuff might actually turn out to be quite crucial.Īlthough the film doesn’t add too many new scenes, they’re all fairly significant. Especially since the film doesn’t stick strictly to the book, but actually adds in some extra scenes. Obviously, it’s not quite that simple, but you can see where some things would need to be trimmed. That means every minute of the film needs to pack in more than three pages’ worth of story. The book is 464 pages long the film is 142 minutes long.

That doesn’t mean that film adaptations are always bad, or even necessarily worse than their literary counterparts – they’re just different.

Scenes that work in a book might not work on screen (check out the TV version of The Shining’s topiary scene for an example of that), and, unless you’re willing to sit through a six hour long film, some plot elements will need to be simplified, subplots removed, and details lost. Things, obviously, will have been changed. It’s always strange watching a film that’s based on a book you’ve read.

Hunger games second book