I don't feel like typing a huge response, but I was pretty underwhelmed by both.
I like some things the book did better, I like some things the movie did better.
With the book, I liked the first part of the book before Katniss got picked. I thought they were making an interesting world and they made Katniss herself interesting. Then the Reaping came and she went to The Capitol. They just spent so damn long leading up to the Hunger Games themselves. I get that Katniss was a small town girl in a big world and it was a completely different foreign world to her, but you don't have to keep reminding me of it every page. The book just kept hitting with the it's so different bit again and again and again and again. I almost quit the book because I got so bored of it.
Then the Hunger Games started and things finally started to pick up. There were some weird parts and I was never sure if they were in an arena or natural wilderness but it was good. This was the part I couldn't put down because I always wanted to see what happened next. The violence was brutal, the part with Rhue was heart-breaking, and Katniss' thoughts kept everything interesting. I dug it.
And then the ending came. The whole mutant dog things were just completely out of the blue and felt really out of place. I know they foreshadowed it a little with the genetic animals, but that was just a ridiculously out of place twist and was really really *really* bad. I was also a little annoyed with the cliff hanger ending but I understand why.
For the movie, it was kind of the opposite. They didn't do that great of a job making the initial world interesting, they kept the business in the capitol short, and the Hunger Games themselves moved a bit too quickly. Like others said, it's a 2 hour movie so they had to squeeze everything they could in. It wasn't a bad movie, it just wasn't anything memorable.
So I guess I liked the book better, though I won't continue the series (books or movies). I understand where they can go from the end of the book, but it just doesn't seem that interesting to me. It was a neat world but I'm done with it. It also doesn't help that I heard the next book just isn't that great and the third book is painful.
