I almost always read the book before I see the movie, but I do then have a hard time giving an objective review of a film, since my brain tends to fill in movie gaps with book facts. 

Regarding Katniss not having any real internal conflict, the books do a fabulous job of showing how her experiences wreck her trust in other people and ability to be vulnerable around others.   It’s pretty clear by the end of the third book that she’s endured a lot of trauma- she’s lost whatever bit of innocence and naivety that she had before going to the Capitol. 

It was mostly effective, but not an ideal solution. There were good parts of the movie, and then there were just good enough parts of the movie.

And no, she doesn’t protest or snark because she is a scared 16-year-old girl and these are people who will TORTURE AND KILL EVERYONE SHE LOVES if she mouths off. It would be ridiculous and unbelievable to show her doing anything else. Katniss is a “heroine of our times” because of how realistically she is portrayed. She isn’t a crime-fighting superhero who flies in to rescue everyone and defeat the evil overlord. She’s a scared, half-starved, emotionally confused teenage girl who volunteers for what she thinks is a death sentence to save her little sister. She doesn’t go in looking to be the face of a rebellion, she just wants to make it out alive. She only grows into her role as a rebel after being pushed to her limits during the Games.

 (And as someone else mentioned, the relationship with Peeta is largely an act on Katniss’s end, designed to win her sympathy from potential sponsors. She does begin to develop real feelings for him, but Katniss is confused at best, and he is far from being her actual boyfriend.) 

http://scientistartist.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-is-katniss-so-cool.html

But, y’know, you can totally dismiss that and just say that because of some plot (not thematic) similarities, her book is a ripoff of a film.And every romance is a ripoff of Tristan & Isolde, right?  Not the film.  The story.  And every heroic quest is a ripoff of Gilgamesh…

Katniss, the central focus of latest eye candy flick The Hunger Games, is another kind of Messiah, but she will not kidnap, torture or brainwash. Instead, she will . . . Read the rest at
http://sleeplessinturtleisland.blogspot.ca/ or
http://sleeplessinturtleisland.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/a-hunger-games-review-katniss-the-female-messiah-spoiler-alert/

The first half is saccharine “90210 In Space”, while the second half is the goriest Hollywood film ever made (up until that point, at least).

Starship Troopers is brilliant, subversive popcorn fare, it gets five stars in my book.

Would you like to know more?

Worse, IMO, wasn’t just that all the people she killed were evil, but that she wasn’t proactive about it. She was made out to be this great hunter, but when it came down to it her kills were semi-accidental or reactionary to them attacking her. She never did any ‘i’m going to kick-ass and survive’ fighting, even against people the audience was set up to hate. All  actual confrontations she had with other contestants either were assisted by other good kids every time – saved multiple times for that matter!

And then the only kill she couldn’t avoid – Peeta- was hand-waved away.

If this semi-pacifism was a point in the book, OK, but I didn’t see any of it established in the movie. Katniss tripped her way around a really deep and character-building conflict, without really demonstraiting how much of a force she was built up to be.

HG is a film/book really without conflict. Not only the nice tributes are eliminated by third parties, the ones Katniss actually kill are portrayed as pure evil. I didn’t read the book, but it seems this is a situation created by the author where she cannot find a suitable solution and decides for a market-oriented approach. Feels like a product.

It is another teen movie. Too bad.

And even if they did, I don’t really care.  I mean, seriously, ideas build off other ideas.  That’s how ideas work, it’s how they SHOULD work.   If the author did read Battle Royale and decide to write their own take on it (which, by the way, the author of 1984 did with an earlier dystopian novel, We), the only moral problem would be in not admitting it… and even that, in a world where lawsuits over things like this are often ridiculous and without merit and successful despite that, I can totally understand.  Since the ideas aren’t spectacularly novel, I’m fine with taking the author at their word.

I do however think Battle Royale is a far better novel than Hunger Games, with a more compelling storyline and that forces the characters to really make unpleasant moral choices.  The thing that strikes me out is that there were 42 students in Battle Royale, and I felt like I knew something about every one of them, every death meant something, was its own story.  In the Hunger Games, there were only 24, and only about 3 of them got any serious development, maybe 2-3 more getting a tiny bit more than a name and a face, and the rest just being murderous ciphers or fodder to be killed off-screen.  The deaths are just props to make the audience feel the heroine was in danger herself.  

But again, I did like both of them, and I’m glad the Hunger Games is successful, especially if it gets more people reading and, moreover, interested in reading SF!

But re-watch To Kill a Mockingbird anyway!

Very thoughtful, well-written review.