With the excitement of the latest Hunger Games movie, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, coming out last month, I found myself wanting to revisit the books themselves before I read the prequel and saw the new movie. The last time I read through The Hunger Games trilogy was likely ten years ago, and I knew the movies left out important details. I wanted to read them and compare each book to their movie counterparts, what I felt they did well, and what the movies should’ve added in.
As I don’t always have a lot of time on my hands to read, I opted to use Audible to listen to each book and devoured them in about a week. Despite knowing the trilogy very well, I found myself surprised at all the details I forgot about, even characters that weren’t in the movies or had so little screen time that you forgot their impact in the books.
The Hunger Games
There are a couple of details in this book that I felt they really shouldn’t have left out, and we’re starting with Madge, the District 12 mayor’s daughter, who’s about the same age as Katniss. Madge doesn’t appear at all in the movie series, but I think this was a missed opportunity. She was Katniss’s friend in the books up until her untimely death in Mockingjay, and while she’s a side character, I felt she was important to Katniss’s character. Throughout this book, she thinks about Madge and their time together and reflects that she may have been Katniss’s first friend. Sure, you have Gale, but she met Madge before him and was an essential character who represented some type of normalcy in an otherwise cruel reality.
In the second book, you learn more details about Madge’s family and the connection between Madge’s aunt, who died in Haymitch’s games and was also Katniss’s mother’s friend. Her aunt was potentially the first person in Katniss’s mom’s life that she lost, and her life is full of grief over loved ones passing.
I also felt like in this book and in the trilogy itself, it doesn’t truly capture the apprehensive friendship/alliance Katniss has with Haymitch. They butted heads in the movies, but the books show how much turmoil there is between them. Despite caring about one another and trying to keep each other alive, they’re constantly at odds with each other.
To go off of that, it also doesn’t wholly portray Katniss’s distrust of Peeta throughout most of this book. In the movie, she’s suspicious of his genuine kindness, but in the book, she’s internally picking at every single thing he says or does and wonders if it’s a ploy to kill her in the games. Even when he confesses his love for her, she doesn’t believe it in the slightest and thinks it’s just part of his plan. It takes her a long time to reconcile that he never had ulterior motives; he just cares about her. It’s brilliant how Suzanne Collins writes Katniss, where she even openly says she doesn’t love anyone except Prim, so the idea of any romantic love is entirely foreign to her and puts her on guard. She was raised in a world where that doesn’t exist in her future because she’s scared of them dying, so she never wanted to love anyone romantically. It’s a shame the movies couldn’t properly explore this idea.
They also leave out almost all of Katniss’s prep team and stylists prevalent in the trilogy: Octavia, Flavius, and Venia. The main one you see is, of course, Cinna, who I adore, but the other three are actually essential parts of the story, too. They love Katniss, and they represent how, despite them being Capitol people, she doesn’t have ill will toward them and doesn’t believe they’re evil. In contrast, Gale resents them in the third book because no matter what, they’re Capitol people and deserve to be taken down like the rest of them, and he doesn’t understand why Katniss defends them.
Finally, at least for this book, of all the things they left out in the movies, this one is a huge miss, in my opinion. They don’t include Peeta’s leg amputation. This is paramount to how he struggles in the rest of the series. By the time they’re thrown in their second games, he’s still not totally adjusted to his prosthetic, and Katniss, while she does have the plan to make sure he wins the games but, also has to look out for him because that amputation has slowed him down. He’s not as steady as he used to be, and it also would’ve been a nice detail to represent those with visible disabilities.
Catching Fire
I’ll say of all the books with their movie counterparts, this one is the most faithful to the source material. It has more moments of Katniss and Prim together, something I wish the movies did because she is the entire reason Katniss volunteers and then ends up in the face of a revolution. None of it would’ve happened without her, and it would make her death in the final movie much more impactful. They also don’t show Prim’s fun and assertive side very well in the film, which is unfortunate.
I also wish we did have the scene where Katniss flees to the woods, and then the electric fence turns on. It’s a harrowing moment where Katniss is forced to climb a tree, fall two stories to the ground, and then come home to peacekeepers expecting her not to return and be caught outside the fence. She was also injured during the fall and has to hide it from the peacekeepers until they leave.
Otherwise, I don’t have a lot of critiques of the movie, and I think it was well done, and they can only do so much with the limited time they have.
Mockingjay
I’m not sure how accurate this is, but when I hear talk about the movies, both Mockingjay movies seem to have the most discourse over missing content and its execution compared to the rest. I can understand why, however. I feel in all of these movies, while they’re doing their best to show you Katniss’s thought process and why she does certain things, I think it gets a little lost in translation. All the books are written from Katniss’s first-person perspective, so you get her thoughts and feelings on everything. You, as the reader, understand how she operates, but it can be confusing on screen.
I remember, despite having read the books myself, feeling confused about her attempted suicide right after she shoots Coin. In the book, you completely get it; she’s so far in the trenches of trauma and thinks there’s no hope for anything, especially after Prim dies, that there’s nothing left. It only doesn’t work because Peeta stops her, which is true in both mediums.
However, I feel this comes out of left field in the movie. You don’t get an in-depth look at how her life, the two games, and the war have completely wrecked her. You get a glimpse of her emotional reactions in the movies, but you’re not fully understanding the severity. Listening to this particular audiobook was heart-wrenching at times because I forgot how guttural her reactions were. After she’s imprisoned for killing Coin, she tries to kill herself for days because she genuinely feels hopeless. Even after she’s sent back to District 12, she’s in a state of numbness for months on end and is even described as having matted hair because she hadn’t showered in so long. When Buttercup the cat shows up looking for Prim, she finally, truly breaks down, and I think that’s the moment she begins to accept that Prim is gone.
They do include that scene in the movie, and I think Jennifer Lawrence does a fantastic job conveying that primal sadness and grief. That scene still brings me to tears, and it’s one of those scenes that I think the movie does better with. It demands a visual to see how much this war and the losses ravaged her.
Most of all, the movies leave out the lasting impact of the trauma she endured. One of the themes of this trilogy is that nobody wins in war; you always lose something, whether it’s your livelihood, a loved one, or yourself. But, when it is over, there’s always hope for a better tomorrow, and Katniss gets that bittersweet ending where she gets a life with Peeta, someone she can definitively say she loves.
I genuinely love this series, and I can’t believe it took me this long to finally revisit the source material. The movies are great in their own right, but I firmly believe that books are better than the movies because you can’t always capture every detail in the film that a book has all the time in the world for. It’s easily a top favorite series and one I will always come back to from time to time. Now, to finally move on to the prequel.
