I haven't read any of the books, so I was not familiar with the term, "Muttation." Which in the books is a genetically altered creature created by the Capital. These creatures come in many forms, and were created to do different tasks like spying on other districts, or being a weapon during the games. One such version of the Muttations is a wolf like creature that we did see in the movie, but was missing a significantly creepy element that was in the book:
Each of the mutts resembled one of the tributes who had died previously in the Games, had a collar marked with the district number of the tribute it was based off of, and had eyes that looked remarkably human. It became apparent that the dead tributes' DNA was mixed with a form of wolf. This made them look so much like their Tribute that Katniss wondered if they had been made using the tributes' real eyes. - thehungergames.wikia.com
What you see below is concept art for the Muttations with the faces of the tributes that died in the film. After glancing over them I'm glad this wasn't added to the film as one of my bigger complaints with the film was the dodgy CGI and I can't imagine this translating well on the screen.
Director Gary Ross even explained to
ScreenRant why he didn't stay true to the book in this instance.
“We made the decision that they not be specific tributes, because if we did it, we would have been a massive digression at a moment in the movie where I didn’t think it could have afforded that. You’re hurdling toward the end and that would have taken a tremendous amount of room at a time when we didn’t have it. However, I will say that all the mutts, if you really look at them, they’re really half-human and half-dog. If you put a mutt’s face next to a dog’s face, and next to a human face, you really will see that they’re a hybrid of the two. And so we were specific about that.
The important thing about the mutts to me was, not specifically that they were tributes, but that they were a creation of the Capitol designed for this particular instrument at this particular moment in the games. And because we had the games and were actually able to show their creation, we were actually able to show them being birthed in that game center and then revealed in the games.
We had the ability to do something by cutting away that a novel isn’t when it’s constantly maintaining Katniss’s point of view."
The Hunger Games hits theaters on March 23rd, 2012. The film stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Lenny Kravitz, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones, Alexander Ludwig, Isabelle Fuhrman, Amandla Stenberg, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland
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