THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2023

A prequel to the original series and a sort-of origin story of those movies' primary villain, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes grounds the world of these stories in a way the previous installments never quite did. Here is a country still recovering from a devastating civil war, divided into districts and forced socioeconomic castes, and operating on one single rule for everyone: survive by any means necessary.

The tale here revolves around a younger Coriolanus Snow, a man who will eventually rule over all of Panem—a united North America of the future—with cold and calculating cruelty. If none of that makes much or any sense, there might be a reason for that. Despite taking place decades beforehand, there's an inherent necessity for one to know the stories of either the first four movies in this series or Suzanne Collins' original three-book source material in order to understand the significance of this new installment.

The screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt, adapting Collins' prequel novel, assumes the basic knowledge of what the Hunger Games are, how this society and country are divided, and why it matters that we're following a seemingly insignificant cog in the totalitarian Captiol's machinery. It's worthwhile, though, because the resulting film is a gripping, unsettling character study and, as a result, easily the best installment in the movie series.

A prologue, set during the "Dark Days" of the civil war, sees a young boy and his cousin scavenging for food, avoiding threats, and hiding from a desperate man who has turned to cannibalism in a war-torn, decimated Capitol. Upon return home, the boy learns that his father, an important military official, has been killed by rebel forces, meaning it's now up to him to ensure that the name Snow has some importance in whatever future might come to Panem.

Jumping ahead 13 years and after the Capitol's victory in the war, the boy is now the young man Coriolanus (a chilly—in a good way—Tom Blyth), the top of his class at the city's most prestigious academy for the children of the country's wealthiest and most elite. He, his cousin Tigris (Gunter Schafer), and their grandmother (played by Finnula Flanagan) have come across hard times financially, so Coriolanus is depending upon a cash prize that's annually awarded to the academy's best graduate.

It's not to come, though, because Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), the head of the Hunger Games, and school dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), the creator of the yearly games where young people from the impoverished districts battle to the death, have seen TV ratings for the event plummet recently. The forthcoming tenth installment of the Hunger Games must be a rousing success if they are to continue, so Gaul has determined that the best students will serve as mentors to the districts' participating "tributes." The goal isn't to make sure their tribute wins, just that the likely condemned participants put on a great show to boost ratings.

The plot more or less follows the formula established by the previous four movies, albeit from this new perspective. That shifted point of view means that discussions of politics, propaganda, and morality become the focus of a story that's loaded with characters—most of whom will meet a defeated, uncertain, or grisly fate—who have various, sometimes conflicting investments in and relationships to the Hunger Games.

Among Coriolanus' peers, his best friend Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera) is the most important. A young man of great financial means, Sejanus is the one student who sees through the political punishment of the games and the forced poverty of the outlying districts—although, once the games are underway, one student vomits upon seeing the initial carnage of the tributes' rush to cull their herd. In the previous movies, being caught up in the spectacle and drama of the Hunger Games often led to a kind of cognitive dissonance, but here, the games often unfold from the distance of giant monitors shaped like old tube televisions.

There's no attempt to make this early, stripped-down version of the blood sport entertaining. Director Francis Lawrence, who directed all but the first installment of this series, strips this world bare of color and imaginative flourishes, which turns out to be the right approach for such desolate material. It's most vital in those scenes from the games themselves, which are filled with emotionally, physically, or psychologically devastated kids, desperate to stay alive and dying too soon for any melodrama to develop in their situation.

The one exception is Coriolanus' tribute Lucy Gray Baird (a fiery but enigmatic Rachel Zegler), a singer by trade and a rebel at heart, who seems to soothe her mentor's terrible opinion of people from the districts. To call what develops between them a romance would be superficially accurate, although the first part is the more decisive half of the description of this relationship.

As it becomes clear that both of these characters might be or are willing to do anything to survive—or, in Coriolanus' gradual case, scheme for power—through their respective situations, though, the very notion of any genuine human connection under such harsh circumstances is called into question. An unexpectedly lengthy third act, which comes after the results of the games and tracks our anti-hero's conniving ways to their poisonous ends, explores that possibility in some genuinely haunting ways, such as when a flock of mocking birds call out doomed men and women's last cries from makeshift gallows.

Narratively, there might not have been a need for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes to exist. The filmmakers have quelled any doubts about that, though, giving us a film that, while it might not stand on its own, re-defines what this series could look like and be.

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