The film version of The Hunger Games is a fine example of the contemporary Hollywood franchise picture. It features a cast full of next-big-things breakout actors supported by old-pro ringers having a blast with funny wigs. It conjures up an intriguing new fantasy world without overdosing on world-building (like John Carter) or mythology (like Green Lantern.) More importantly, it manages to capture the propulsive energy of Suzanne Collins’ novel. Adapting a great book into a good movie is not an easy task, and the makers of Hunger Games deserve credit just for the bad decisions they didn’t make. (They didn’t Twilight the movie into a romantic “triangle;” they didn’t turn Peeta into someone who could even remotely be construed as a badass; the kids still kill each other.) But there is one important aspect of the original novel that is almost entirely absent from the movie: The darkly funny way in which Collins directly accuses the audience. As in, us. Weirdly, by turning the book into such a fan-baiting crowdpleaser, the movie version of Hunger Games seems to oddly miss the point of its own source material.

Every great YA book series of the modern age has an origin story. Think of J.K. Rowling writing on napkins, or Stephenie Meyer’s vampire dream, or Christopher Paolini being twelve. The story goes that Hunger Games came to Suzanne Collins while she was channel-surfing between a reality show and footage from the Middle East wars. That’s why the book, despite its reputation, is not just a junior-high remake of The Most Dangerous Game.