@dgw I completely agree about the characters being just as flat as they were written in the books. That was something that bothered me deeply while reading it — how we know nothing about those who aren't involved in the main romance bullsh*t. And, yes, the film mainly goes through the plot points of the book without adding any flavor to them. It felt like they were obligated to finish the saga, really. (Also, thanks for the spelling check, fixed it haha)
@aag "romance bullsh*t" is right. YA novel or not, that was much too heavily emphasized. (Now that you fixed it I can edit the brackets out of my quote :D)
Review by dgwVIP 9BlockedParent2016-10-20T11:57:36Z
Seriously. The big dramatic moments are unbelievably rushed—there's no time to dig into them. There's too much focus on bad CGI and not enough on characters. Basically every character is 2D at best, except maybe Katniss and Peeta. But that's also due to sticking true to the book. None of the characters in the books were particularly well fleshed out, either, as I recall (from reading them 3 ½ years ago).
I also found the story very predictable. Obviously there's some amount of subconscious influence from having read the books, but it's also just absolutely clear when the big surprises/twists are going to happen, and what they'll be. They end up not being surprising at all. (Not to belabor the point, but the book had this problem too.)
My other big issue—which applies to the whole series—is that we barely see anything that happens away from Katniss. I know it's quite common in YA novels to present a limited first-person perspective from the protagonist's point of view, but in a big political saga like this I feel like that severely limits the storytelling.