Today I am watching the latest Harry Potter installment and during a break to dry my hair my mind wandered, as it is wont to do, to another book series movie adaptation, The Hunger Games. It is a different world that this movie is being filmed in as opposed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone way back in 2001 and I think that makes all the difference.
I loved The Hunger Games series all the way through to the end. Notice that the end of the series and the closing of the storyline did not bother me in the least? I at first wondered if it was because I was reading it from an adult perspective and lacked the romantic ideology of the target audience. I have since been dissuaded of that notion by reading comment threads on different websites where women of my age were angered by the resolution of the “romantic” storyline. ( Come on, everyone loves a good romance, right? Kinda missing the point of the books aren’t you? I use the quotations because the storyline was never romantic as it takes two to make a romance and Katniss was never fully invested in either boy. Blame another series, of course, for this idea that two boys fighting over a girl is the ultimate in swoon worthy romance. Team Edward/Team Jacob? I for one have always been Team Buffy/Spike/Angel, an infinitely better story of two guys, one girl and no winners.) Anyhoo, Mockingjay is when I started to notice the negative comments lambasting the author on her choice of ending. The comments of the fans were both voracious and downright mean. I at first was offended by some of the comments and wrote others off as teenagers too young to see that the real story was how it is impossible to recover from war.
Now we approach the beginning of filming for the first movie. The three main characters have been set and the negativity is back. You can’t go on an internet site that mentions the movie without seeing the bitter diatribes of the fans. Josh Hutcherson has the jaw line of a god and has exhibited a love for his character that makes me trust that he will not screw up Peeta for me which is good because Peeta is my favorite character in the story. Does he look like the Peeta in my head? Of course not, but that doesn’t get me foaming at the mouth as others seem to be doing over his casting. I mean, who cares what color his hair is if it serves no actual purpose to the story? Do Peeta’s blonde locks make him more of a hero? If Josh colors his hair blonde as has been widely reported will it make him more believable? He is not portraying a real person. He is portraying a fictional person from a book. Everyone needs to get over themselves.
Then we have Liam Hemsworth as Gale and he has not been overly vocal on his casting so I have no opinion on how well he will play his part. I always found Gale to be a sneaky, underhanded user of Katniss. Go ahead Team Gale, be peeved. It is no skin off my back. He wanted a revolution and he found the object to start the revolution sitting right next to him. How convenient. Unfortunately, he and the other revolutionaries chose to not notice that she was never actually on board with being the face of the uprising.
We will skip over Jennifer Lawrence and her casting as Katniss, partly because I have no opinion on it and partly because I have gotten off track from what this started out as earlier which was a statement on fans and their “ownership” of beloved characters and stories.
Back to Harry Potter: The internet was not what it is today when Harry Potter started filming. The target audience for Potter when it first started was pretty young and not wired in as much as they are a short decade later. What kind of response would they have had if they had been as connected as they are today? Would they have lamented over Daniel Radcliff’s blue eyes or the great age discrepancy of the impeccable Alan Rickman as the gloriously dreadful Snape? It is true that some people were disappointed in the final book but even they did not have the tone of disparagement in their comments that I have seen for Mockingjay.
I for one do not believe that the fans would have been as overwrought as The Hunger Games fans. Why do I think this? I think it is because most Harry Potter fans that have been around since the beginning don’t feel that J.K. Rowling owes us anything for the success of the series either in print or on film. She doesn’t owe us the correct color of eyes for Harry or an actor a few decades younger for Snape because ultimately it is the narrative that needs to be faithful. That has never changed in seven movies even if the timelines were fiddled with and scenes were added/changed/deleted. The story is always there, recognizable and complete. Throughout the series, a new book or movie came out and we said “thank you.” We didn’t say “but you did it wrong!” We only whined when there was too much time between books or movie adaptations because we were hungry for more.
That is what the comments on anything concerning The Hunger Games movie come across as, though: people who believe that Suzanne Collins owes them for her books succeeding instead of fans who owe her their trust for writing books that we love. Yes, other books have been massacred on film. Chris Columbus will never be forgiven for Percy Jackson. He didn’t stay true to the story and the film suffered for it.
As long as Suzanne Collins, who seems to have the reigns of the movie well in hand along with the director, stays true to the story the fans should have no complaints. Complain they will though until the movie is done and their opinions either confirmed or denied, from Peeta’s hair color to Katniss’ height and on to Gale being too pretty. I hope the movie is as well told as the books because it is a worthy story that deserves a worthy telling.
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