Rose Matafeo: I like my movies like I like my milk - whole

Opinion

Rose Matafeo spent $30 to see the new Hunger Games film, Mockingjay, so you don't have to.

Last week, I spent $30 to have a nap. It was the midnight screening of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 and I had foolishly said yes to a group Gold Class outing (yeah, I'm classy) to see the latest installment.

Although I loved the first two, I went in (to Gold Class) with low expectations. And guess what, I was right y'all. The film was boring as hell and I fell asleep three times, that's how little action there was.

I walked out of the (GOLD CLASS) cinema struggling to remember what exactly happened in the movie. It was almost about nothing. It seemed as if the screenplay was written by an overzealous 4th form Social Studies student who has just learnt that "like, war and poverty is really bad you guys. So let's like, make a movie about that."

From what I can gather from the Wikipedia synopsis of Mockingjay, the first half of the book is basically a setup for the action-packed excitement of the second half. So, essentially, they've spent around $100 million bringing the most boring part of a story to life as a standalone film.

This horrific trend of splitting film adaptations of teen lit into parts is a recent development. It started with Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows - Part 1 and 2, which may as well had been renamed Harry Potter 7: Give Us Your Pocket Money Punk because essentially, this is what it was.

Studio bigwigs and fat cat financiers had finally figured out how to make even more money from die hard teen fiction fans after they had exhausted their gimmicky 3D revival.

Others followed suit, and soon Twilight, The Hobbit and The Hunger Games had been hacked into a million little pieces, while kids and teens had to fork out $15 to see each little piece. It's like doing the most expensive jigsaw puzzle of all time.

"B-b-b-b-but there's simply too much material to work with here!" producers will whine when trying defend themselves. Don't give me that bulls*** PJ, we're talking about children's books here. The Hobbit is a large print story about dwarves rocking up to a mountain, meeting a dragon and then - spoiler alert - having a really boring war at the end.

Are you telling me that you found enough stuff in a book of 320 pages to warrant three average films, yet you managed to condense the 187,790 words of The Fellowship of The Ring into one great film?

I read The Hobbit when I was 10 years old and loved it; so much so that my first email address was bilbo_and_co@hotmail.com, a name that got me teased on MSN Messenger for years to come.

I once stained one of the pages of my hardback copy with grease from ETA 'The Works' chips and vowed never to eat them again. Twelve years on I have managed to abstain, even at parties where it's the only chip flavour they've provided.

What guts me is that The Hobbit films aren't made for the audience that Tolkien wrote the book for - children. Those kids who are reading The Hobbit for the first time are now going to have to sit through three excruciatingly long films to see it come to life.

Let's just hope it's a fad. Because I swear to all the gods, if I see a trailer for The Very Hungry Caterpillar: Part 1 of 5 I'm going to straight up lose my mind.

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