Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” (the first book in a best-selling young-adult trilogy) is a sensational piece of pop primitivism—a Hobbesian war of all against all. In a dystopian society in the future, a group of wealthy, epicene overlords—authoritarians with violet hair and the vicious manners of French courtiers—threaten and control an impoverished population. Years ago, the virtuous commoners rose up, unsuccessfully, against their decadent rulers, and they’ve been both cosseted and terrorized ever since by a yearly lottery in which two teens from each of twelve districts are selected, trained, and turned into media stars. They are then set loose in a controlled wilderness, where they must survive hunger and one another, until only one of them is left alive. The survivor will bring home to his district both glory and food, and everyone, rich and poor, watches the events on television. Collins’s idea seems to be derived from the bloodier Greek myths and Roman gladiatorial contests (the big shots have names like Seneca and Claudius); from William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”; and from TV spectacles like the myriad “Survivor” shows and sado-Trumpian elimination contests. Collins’s strategy of putting girls and boys (some as young as twelve) at the center of a deadly struggle adds tense, nasty excitement to the old tales and tawdry TV rituals she draws on.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in the adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s young-adult novel “The Hunger Games.” Illustration by André Carrilho

Trying to explain the trilogy’s extraordinary popularity, critics and commentators have reached for metaphors. Perhaps it’s that the books offer a hyper-charged version of high school, an everyday place with incessant anxieties: constant judgment by adults; hazing, bullying, and cliques; and, finally, college-entry traumas. If you stretch the metaphor a bit, the books could be seen as a menacing fable of capitalism, in which an ethos of competition increasingly yields winner-take-all victors. Collins might seem to be one of those victors herself: there are twenty-four million copies of the trilogy in print in the United States alone. But maybe the reason for its success is simple: it makes teens feel both victimized and important.

Collins understands her audience well, and she can write. Her first-person narrator, Katniss Everdeen, who hails from a shabby coal-mining area, is a tough, resourceful girl, a huntress who protects her family. Collins, staying inside Katniss’s head, produces short, tactile sentences that are precise about apprehension and physical experience. However fanciful the basic premise, the books are rugged girls’ adventure literature of the kind that used to be written for boys. Making an exciting movie out of “The Hunger Games” should not have been that hard.

I certainly have no quarrel with the casting. Jennifer Lawrence demonstrated a convincing strength as Ree, the Ozarks girl with a husky voice and pale-blue eyes in “Winter’s Bone.” In “The Hunger Games,” as Katniss—a more dynamic version of Ree—she has a lightly burnished copper complexion, and when she’s still, there’s something luminous, slightly otherworldly about her. Her gravity and her steady gaze make her a fine heroine. And I enjoyed nineteen-year-old Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, the other competitor from Katniss’s district, who adores her; he has a lost look, an engaging not-quite-handsomeness. In true young-adult-fiction style, Katniss has a second admirer—stalwart, gentle Gale, played by Liam Hemsworth, who looks, in this movie, like a larger Taylor Lautner. Among the adults, Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks, wearing enormous wigs, camp it up as the rulers. Though the satiric point of making some of the plutocrats monsters out of an eighteenth-century farce eludes me, the actors try hard for vulgar panache, and they perform with professional skill.

But the rest of “The Hunger Games” is pretty much a disaster—disjointed, muffled, and even, at times, boring. Collins herself labored on the script, along with Gary Ross and Billy Ray, and Ross (“Pleasantville,” “Seabiscuit”) directed. Working with the cinematographer Tom Stern, Ross shoots in a style that I have come to despise. A handheld camera whips nervously from one angle to another; the fragments are then jammed together without any regard for space. You feel like you’ve been tossed into a washing machine (don’t sit in the front rows without Dramamine). Even when two people are just talking calmly, Ross jerks the camera around. Why? As the sense of danger increases, he has nothing to build toward. Visually, he’s already gone over the top. And the action itself is a thrashing, incoherent blur—kids tumbling on the ground or wrestling with each other. Katniss stalks various kids with her bow and arrow, but she kills only one intentionally—a domineering sadist—and you don’t see the arrow hit him; you don’t even see him fall. Ross consistently drains away all the tensions built into the grisly story—the growing wariness and suspicion that each teen-ager must feel as the number of those still alive begins to diminish, or the horror (or glee) that some of them experience as they commit murder. The camera rushes through the wilderness, but, in the end, the movie looks less like a fight to the death than like a scavenger hunt. Katniss is always finding something useful in a tree or lying on the ground.

“The Hunger Games” is a prime example of commercial hypocrisy. The filmmakers bait kids with a cruel idea, but they can’t risk being too intense or too graphic (the books are more explicit). After a while, we get the point: because children are the principal audience, the picture needs a PG-13 rating. The result is an evasive, baffling, unexciting production—anything but a classic.

Is bullying on the rise? The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children claims that a hundred and sixty thousand kids stay home from school each day out of fear, but hard numbers that would identify a trend are difficult to come by. The National Center for Education Statistics has documented a rapid rise in recent years in the number of reported incidents of bullying, but that may reflect an increase in reporting rather than in actual incidents. We can’t measure the current rancor against the bullying of fifty or a hundred years ago, and the causes are difficult to pinpoint. Yet many people feel that kid-on-kid malevolence has become a kind of epidemic, given the prevalence of cyber-bullying and, in particular, the unnerving stories of teen-age suicides that have dominated the headlines in recent months.

Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen, the filmmakers who made the moving documentary “Bully,” don’t try to answer any questions. They avoid charts and graphs, talking heads and sociology. Their approach is more direct and, perhaps, more effective. They chose as their subjects five youths from different parts of the country. As the movie begins, two of them are dead. Tyler Long, of Murray County, Georgia, hanged himself in 2009, when he was seventeen; Ty Smalley, who lived outside Oklahoma City, shot himself in 2010, when he was eleven. The boys’ presence, mostly in old home videos, haunts the film. Both had been persistently bullied. We hear about what happened—physical intimidation, some of it severe—from their inconsolable parents, but why the boys were targeted remains a mystery. Hirsch and Lowen, hoping to celebrate their subjects, have rightly created a lyrical work. They film the other kids at home, at school, and at leisure, as they wander in the woods or around railroad yards. At times, the movie becomes a wistful idyll of rural American childhood under threat. Violence hangs in the air.

One of the subjects is Alex Libby, a twelve-year-old seventh grader at East Middle School, in Sioux City, Iowa. Alex was born prematurely, and he has a slightly curved and flattened upper lip. He’ll be considered cool-looking when he’s older (an American Belmondo), but he doesn’t know that yet, and he has been bullied for his appearance since grade school. The filmmakers embedded themselves at East Middle School for a year, and filmed many children, so as to disguise their real purpose, which was to see how Alex copes with his predicament. He mostly takes it in silence, because he wants to maintain the fiction that his tormentors are his friends. His father tells him to stand up for himself, but some kids are not fighters. Sitting in the back of a school bus, the filmmakers, using a Canon 5D Mark II, which looks like a still camera, managed to shoot a rubbery little heavyweight beating Alex.

Hirsch and Lowen took the footage to Alex’s parents, and they went, enraged, to the school administrators, who had also watched it. The Libbys come across as loving and alert, as do the parents of the two other kids in the film—Ja’Meya Jackson, a fourteen-year-old African-American girl in rural Mississippi, and Kelby Johnson, in Tuttle, Oklahoma, who is sixteen years old and openly gay. Ja’Meya’s mother fights for her daughter in the criminal-justice system after Ja’Meya, tired of being called stupid, waved a loaded revolver at kids on her school bus. Kelby’s father says that, once his daughter came out, the kids at her school turned on her, and the town began shunning the entire family. Kelby, it becomes clear, doesn’t want to pick up and go elsewhere—though she has cuts on her wrist, she’s jolly and combative—and her father supports her decision. The school administrators we see, however, cannot be described as alert. (At East Middle School, the vice-principal assures the Libbys that the students on the bus are as “good as gold.”) Their attitude is one variant or another on “Kids will be kids.” Managing huge public institutions, they don’t know how to change the culture they work in.

“Bully” has powerful friends: the Weinstein Company is distributing it, and celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Justin Bieber, and Meryl Streep have been talking it up and appearing at screenings. But only a change in popular culture can seriously affect attitudes, and, at the moment, that change is being impeded by an improbable enemy—the Motion Picture Association of America. The M.P.A.A.’s rating board counted six “f”-words in the film and gave it an R rating, a decision that has effectively destroyed the possibility that the picture will do any good. Most public schools are not going to sponsor screenings of an R-rated film, no matter how high-minded, and somehow I can’t see bullies demanding that their parents take them to the mall to see “Bully.”

Chris Dodd, the former Connecticut senator who is now the head of the M.P.A.A., has said, “If we change the ruling in this case, I’ll have ten other filmmakers lined up saying they shouldn’t be given the R. And who are we to say why this film should be different than the others?” For starters, the M.P.A.A. could consider the context in which profanity is used. In “Bully,” the most virulent use of it is by a boy who threatens Alex Libby in a particularly obscene way. That child uses the word to frighten and to punish. The rest of the language is just color and punctuation, like most profanity, and few middle schoolers today are likely to be wounded by it.

Katy Butler, a seventeen-year-old high-school junior in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had a finger broken by kids when she was in middle school, began an online petition drive to fight the M.P.A.A.’s rating, which, so far, has more than four hundred thousand signatures. Kids may understand better than their elders what actually threatens them. ♦