The Hunger Games DVD

Although we had already seen the film The Hunger Games, when it premiered in March 2012, it was not long before the DVD joined our collection, when it was released in August the same year.

I have to say that having read all of The Hunger Games Trilogy that I went to see the film with some trepidation. I throughly enjoyed the books by Suzanne Collins, and there's always the worry that a film version will leave you disappointed.

Yes, there were a few deviations from the original story, but all in all I was happy with the film and particularly the performances by Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss Everdeen), Josh Hutcherson (Peeta Mellark) and Liam Hemsworth (Gale Hawthorn). In addition Woody Harrelson made a very convincing Haymitch, even if his behaviour was toned down in the movie in order to get a 13 Rating (12 in the UK) and Elizabeth Banks was excellent as the seemingly confident, but totally vulnerable, Effie Trinket.

In The Hunger Games, reality TV is taken to a new level. There's no escaping the cameras, which are there to witness every tragedy as it is played out. That of children and teens being forced to kill each other in order to survive. Some of these kids are evil through and through and think nothing of meeting out death to a rival, but you do wonder how others would have coped if they had not been killed first.

The extensive use of hand-held cameras results in an intimacy that would not have been achieved using normal cameras on tracks as the kids run through the forest, some obvious targets and others as predators. And Director Gary Ross had a tough job. It was important that the violence was not toned down or much of the central core of the film would have been lost, but at the same time what we saw on camera could not be too explicit or the film would not have been accessible to the major part of its target audience - teens.

Ross did an excellent job of creating scenes where it was not too difficult to imagine what was happening, without actually seeing it. Although I did think that the final scenes failed to convey what had actually happened to the Tributes who were killed (but I won't say what for fear of spoling it for those who have not seen it yet).

Any author who wants to have a successful novel needs to establish characters that the reader cares about right from the start, so that you will stick with them until the end. In a story about killing, you need an audience that will care a great deal about whether the central characters are killed or not. It's the same with a film. In The Hunger Games you find yourself worrying about who will survive, but there's a clever twist.

Not only do you start to care about Katniss, Gale and Peeta, and if all three will make it through to the end, but there's also the sub-plot. IF they all survive, who will Katniss end up with?

Gale or Peeta?

Roll on the next films: Catching Fire, released November 2013, Mockingjay Part 1 in November 2014 and Part 2 in November 2015.

The Hunger Games Series goes a long way to placating those of us who still mourn the end of Harry Potter!!

It was my youngest daughter who got me hooked on The Hunger Games Books. She bought the first one and enjoyed it so much that during a mid-term break she pestered me into taking her to the book shop in the town so she could get the other two books.

She then disappeared into her bedroom for a couple of days, only emerging for food and the bathroom, until she had finished the books. She then raved about them for days, so of course I had to take a look....and that was me hooked too!