[Rating: Solid Rock Fist Up]
It is crazy to think that the film franchise of The Hunger Games was released a mere 11 years ago. I remember going to opening night (big mistake) and sitting with the sold out crowd to watch the girl on fire challenge the sport that finds children killing children for the enjoyment of the rich and powerful. But in that world who exactly came up with the modern ideas for what we know as The Hunger Games? The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes explores the story of future president Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) and his involvement in the tenth annual games.
Coriolanus comes from the once-powerful Snow family, in the Capital of Panem. As a student of the University under Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) who has his own animosity toward the Snow name and the nefarious Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), Snow struggles to keep his family name prideful. He can barely survive in a once glorious penthouse with his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) and Grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan). When he is given the high honor of being a mentor to a tribute of the districts, he is placed with a rebellious young woman named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). In order to use the new strategy of receiving bets for Lucy Gray to come off as winnable, Snow begins to develop a working partnership with her in order to not only gain the money to help her, but her trust. As he develops more than feelings for her, he begins to question what The Hunger Games are really for. Along with his classmates, including Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera) they get to witness the messiness of the games and question why the games are still in existence.
I am a fan of The Hunger Games books and movies. I think Catching Fire is one of the greatest sequels to a film and the lore of Panem is fun to read about. I loved that the filmmakers decided to ditch a good chunk of the CGI that this film’s predecessor used too much. Instead we get beautiful interior structures and vast fields of grass that are real and put the characters into the environments of life and death. Davis and Dinklage give outstanding performances that their combined (roughly) 15 minutes of screentime was not enough. Zegler is a vocal powerhouse and beautiful actress and Blyth’s descent into the future president is commendable.
My main gripe with this film is its length. The book itself is 500-plus pages and a good chunk of that felt to me like the third half of the story. Which leads us to the film’s third act that feels not only awkward in the entire story, but should have been even more condensed down from its source material. The entire section of The Hunger Games is perfectly paced, so why bog it down with an hour of extra material when a tight 30 would have sufficed!? Kudos to director Francis Lawrence for realizing his mistake of dividing the final Hunger Games movies into two parts, and instead just made this one long. Pro and con!
I think The Hunger Games franchise is some of the sharpest and most thought provoking series ever made. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes examines not only the franchise’s underlying theme of humanity, but we get to see the rise of an absolute vicious tyrant. Snow has to land on top somewhere after all.
Christian Ramos is a classic film fan, having had the dream to host Turner Classic Movies for years now. He also has a large amount of Oscar trivia in his head, remembers dressing as Groucho Marx one Halloween, and cherishes the moment Julianne Moore liked his tweet.
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