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The movie The Hunger Games is based off of Suzanne Collin’s book with the same name. The book is 100% first person, with a lot of detail coming from thoughts made by Katniss Everdeen. However, the movie wasn’t strictly shot from Katniss’ point of view. They also didn’t include any sort of narrative to the movie, relying instead on Stanly Tucci’s character Caesar Flickerman for some vital information during the games.

Why was the decision made to shoot the movie without a narrative by the main character, Katniss Everdeen?

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AirieFenix has given a really good answer above, but I would also add that first-person movies very rarely work satisfactorily.

A great example would be Lynch's Dune, which sought to pile on as much exposition as possible through the use of copious inner monologues in the form of voice overs. Personally I don't have a problem with the film, but many viewers found this confusing and stilted.

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+1 Hah, I also immediately thought about Dune when talking about "spoken thoughts". That's something I always found unique (and liked) about it. For me it made a great contribution to the overall atmosphere in the scenes where it was used. But in this case I'd rather consider it a stylistic technique than a story-telling one. I guess it is not the only thing for viewers to find strange about the movie (though still being one of Lynch's more understandable movies) ;). – Christian Rau Mar 28 '12 at 16:40
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This kind of questions come here over and over when we talk about adaptations (books to movies, games to movies, comics to games, etc.) and it's really simple to answer:

1) Because movies aren't the same as books (the same could be used in terms of comics, games, manga, anime, etc. etc.).

Really, keep in mind that maybe the book could be a really incredible experience to be read. But as I said: to be READ. Trying to copy and paste the narrative mechanisms to another kind of art it's very tempting but it could be a disaster, too. Talking about the subject in question, The Hunger Games it's very easy to read because Katniss explains everything (one of the reasons, but let's stay only with this for now). That's because the reader simply watches Panem through Katniss eyes, he haven't the need to construct explanations in his mind. In the case of a movie, the images explain themself.

Could you imagine two hours of movie with Katniss saying things like "I'm hurt", "now I'm hungry", "now I'm falling in love with Peeta... or maybe not" and the sequence of images showing the exact same thing? Boring.

2) The reason two is way more psycological: Collins and the director (Gary Ross) have two different ways to telling the same story, and really that's it. Two different POVs, two different narrative tools, two different minds, two different ways to show us the same thing...

Personally, I like both the book and the movie, each for its own reasons. Both the movie ande the book show a really dramatical image of a very degenerate world, but both do this in its very unique way.

PS: sorry for my english, I'm just learning, I hope you understand what I wrote.

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Your English is excellent. – iandotkelly♦ Mar 27 '12 at 16:23
Thanks for the comment and for adding some useful info to my answer. – AirieFenix Mar 27 '12 at 17:20

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