The book explains some things, but some are still terrible

Rating: 1/10 (7 December 2012)

I expected much more tension and drama from this story. Some things are better explained in the book. Other things in the movie go exactly by the book, which is not so great itself, so I wasn't sure how to rate the movie.
Katniss doesn't look as she should. It is mentioned in the book several times that she is much lighter than the Career tributes, allowing her to climb trees and whatnot. In the movie, a girl who is smaller than her totally knocks her to the ground.
Katniss never has to fight a good kid. All the contestants she kills are blatantly evil. There are no moral choices, no drama. An exception to this is in the end, when she is left with Peeta. They pull something no one has thought of doing in 73 years and succeed, because the bloodthirsty audience loves a good love story.
Katniss, forced to climb a tree with 4 kids trying to kill her, conveniently encounters a nest of killer-wasps and knocks it down, conveniently killing the girl with the only bow in the arena, which happens to be Katniss's weapon of choice.
In the book, the way I understood it, Cato killed the boy who planted the mines *because* he messed up and set them too close to the equipment. They did not intend for the equipment to be destroyed. In the movie, it just looked stupid.
However, the idea of mines that can be activated by an apple falling from a small height is terrible. They work that way in the book, too. It is said that a girl once dropped a small wooden ball and was blown to bits. Wouldn't the bits then activate other mines, causing a chain explosion and killing more contestants? The mines were all around, preventing the children from moving or jumping in any direction. Even if the tributes were at a safe distance from one another, mines that can be activated by a passing squirrel sounds like a terrible idea.
In the arena where only one tribute can survive, there had to be a cliché scene in which a bad girl pins Katniss down and then talks what she'll do to her instead of killing her. When the boy showed up at the bad girl's back and said, "Oh, really?", I felt insulted and paused the movie in disbelief. Apparently, this boy did not want to team up with Rue, but he wanted to avenge her death *and* let the deadly ranger, Katniss, go. But it doesn't matter, he died off-screen, because Katniss never has to fight a good kid.
For those who haven't read the books, don't worry, the second part is even worse. Literally 3/4 of the book is village life, dresses and interviews.
Also, I was disappointed when I learned that the idea of children being thrown in an arena wasn't original and that it was already done in Battle Royale.