The Hunger Games is set in Panem, a dystopian, post-global-warming, possibly post-nuclear-apocalypse North America. The ruling class resides in the lavish, futuristic Capitol while relying on the 12 outlying Districts for what's left of the Earth's natural resources. To keep the Districts under control, the Capitol employs a regime of deprivation and propaganda, the keystone of which is the Hunger Games. Every year, each district must offer two children as "tributes" for the Games, in which they're thrown into a survival setting and must fight each other to the death on live TV. It is, quite literally, Survivor.

Our heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), volunteers for the Games in place of her younger sister, who's first selected. One point for martyrdom! She surprises Game-viewers with her killer archery skills. Two points for being a badass! She shocks the Capitol with her humanity during the Games, forging friendships with her competitors and protesting the brutality of the situation. Three points for sparking a revolution!

Much of this storyline recalls the generic sci-fi arc, but the reality-TV-gone-haywire framing makes it feel specific to right now. Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman is everything the Ryan Seacrests and Carson Dalys of the world wish they could be: His glittery cobalt suit and egomaniacal cackle seem the inevitable endpoint of the evolution of today's reality host. He plays up now-familiar tropes, drawing out each contestant in interviews, narrating moving stories of their lives back home, and seemingly siding with each one—a structure no different than that of American Idol or The Voice, really, except that only one contestant will survive.

Once Katniss and her competitors enter the Arena, essentially a big forest, Ross provides constant reminders of the artificiality of the set-up. The bucolic natural setting is occasionally pierced by piped-in announcements from the Games' designers, who manipulate the action from a high-tech perch. Frequent cuts from the tributes whittling spears and roasting rodents to technicians using touchscreens to launch lethal fireballs and mutant attack dogs at them emphasize who's really to blame for the savagery on display.

This is a clever way to soften the most disturbing aspect of The Hunger Games: its central plot point of children tearing one another's guts out. Much has been written about Lionsgate's navigation of this minefield during marketing and rating, but the on-screen violence turns out to be relatively tame. The death of the youngest contestant is nearly bloodless, despite the spear lodged in her abdomen. The most graphic scene of the book, in which rabid dogs eat a boy alive, is only glimpsed from a distance.