"...The cinematic version in contrast to the novel plays down the author’s intended cultural satire [...] The inherent violence in the story’s premise is toned down in the cinematic telling to enable a PG-13 rating and thus attract a wider and younger audience. Lost in translation is Collins’ original cultural critique. Instead, the film plays like a reality TV show on steroids, Survivor with swords.
"We need cultural satire, and with it a renewed sense of moral outrage. We must avoid being numbed to the cartoon violence of a first-person-shooter video game—Call of Duty for tweens. Would it not have been more culturally beneficial and honest to depict The Hunger Games as an NC-17 pornographic slasher film? What happens when satire loses its force as satire? When dystopia—”an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror”—becomes an accepted neighbourhood within the cultural imagination, when it shifts from critique to description? When this happens, something seriously amiss is at work in our cultural psyche. This shift is what The Hunger Games reveals. "
Source: "When Reality Overwhelms Satire: What The Hunger Games Reveals | Cardus Blog." Cardus. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 May 2012. <http://www.cardus.ca/blog/2012/04/when-reality-overwhelms-satire-what-the-hunger-games-reveals/>.