The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
LionsgateWhether it was warranted or not, director Francis Lawrence returns to the world of The Hunger Games to adapt Suzanne Collins’ prequel book, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. After the disastrous The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, one would’ve hoped that another filmmaker would lend their vision to the world of Panem 64 years before the events of The Hunger Games. However, more than most, he understands the characters Collins put to paper in her book series. All he needs to bring The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to life successfully is a good script without losing himself in dividing the book into multiple parts for the screen.
Funnily enough, the film itself is divided into three parts, with Parts One and Two focusing on The Hunger Games themselves, where Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, playing a younger version of Donald Sutherland’s character in the original Hunger Games franchise) is tasked to mentor Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) before the 10th Hunger Games are televised. While the Capitol of Panem treats the Hunger Games tributes as objects of attraction and fascination before they fight to the death, Snow believes it would be best if they are humanized on television for the audience to attach themselves to someone they ultimately root for.
Snow convinces head game maker Dr. Volumina Gaul (Viola Davis) and Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) to bend some of the rules, which impresses the former but not the latter, who vows to ensure he will not win the Plinth Prize, awarded to the most successful mentor at the end of the Games. This causes tension in his family, with Coryo’s cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) telling him he is playing a dangerous game with Panem’s most powerful.
Only when The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes cuts to its third part, where Snow faces a moral challenge following the end of The Hunger Games, does its core theme appear and clarify exactly why Lawrence presented the first two parts in painstaking detail. Strangely, the third part currently divides critics the most, with many calling it sluggish and overlong compared to how engaging the first two are. Running at 157 minutes, the film certainly would’ve benefited from a tighter ending (the final scene between Snow and Highbottom is ridiculously inert), but removing the third part completely also removes the entire point of the movie.
Snow isn’t a good guy. And as much as the first two parts ask audiences to sympathize with him and Lucy, he grows to be an even more ruthless leader than what is shown in the prequel. At first, he’s shown with Tigris as one full of hope, thinking that all pieces will fall into place naturally. But as he evolves throughout the tenth game, directly experiencing incredible amounts of love and starting to feel romantically entwined with Lucy, alongside physical and psychological pain, Snow’s arc evolves on a dark path where there is no going back to. This only comes to fruition in its emotionally complex third act, where Snow and his best friend Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera)’s allegiances to Panem are tested in more ways than one.
Some of its storytelling elements are a tad undercooked, especially when it comes to Sejanus’ arc, but Blyth brilliantly showcases Snow’s multiple facets as he moves towards the Snow Donald Sutherland played in the main installments. Of course, he doesn’t embody the same spirit Sutherland portrayed, but that’s by design. Lawrence wants audiences to attach themselves to Blyth’s Snow and his relationship with Lucy because it’ll make his shift from quasi-hero to villain all the more devastating, even if they ultimately know what will transpire in its final act.
Blyth is simply riveting to watch from beginning to end, emotionally feeding his portrayal of the character through his relationship with Tigris, Lucy, Gaul, and Sejanus. All of the side characters impact his decisions, one way or another, whether he realizes it or not. And each bit of information he receives from the people he encounters in his life shapes who he becomes in the main films. This shift isn’t easy to pull off, especially when it isn’t as clear as some audience members want it to be, but look at how he presents himself in the first two parts and the last. His body language and physical demeanor slowly change, and it’s not that obvious to spot.
Consider an important scene between Lucy and Snow in its final act, where Coryo snaps without realizing it. It’s such a subtle scene where Lucy immediately recognizes something is wrong with how she initially perceived him when the two met for the first time, but Coryo does not. That’s the film’s most important moment, where Coryo is fully corrupted by his desire for absolute power, willing to serve himself before the interests of everyone else. He’ll never be the same after it, but that decision will ultimately bite him back one day when Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) dares to fight back.
Zegler is also excellent as Baird, giving the right emotional composure needed for the character to evolve beyond making her the “Katniss Everdeen” of this film. It also helps that she sings so incredibly well, with Lawrence fully knowing how talented an actor she is. Spielberg’s West Side Story put her on the map, but this may be her best performance yet. She “enjoys the show” and makes the most out of giving the citizens of Panem a performance, but once again, in the third act, her character grows more riveting and psychologically complex. Some of her arc gets truncated in the end, but it’s a minor nitpick to an otherwise raw talent continuing to prove just how magnetic she is on screen.
With The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Lawrence continues his collaboration with cinematographer Jo Willems, whom he has worked with since The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It also marks the first time since that movie that Lawrence and Willems utilize the IMAX frame for several sequences, including The Hunger Games itself. Of course, nothing will beat the aspect ratio change of Catching Fire, but The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes may be Lawrence’s most visually averse project yet.
The camera consistently moves within its claustrophobic arena, which gives a sense of immersion rarely seen in blockbusters these days. The fact that it costs $100 million and looks better than most $200 million+ blockbusters made today only reaffirms that these films are money-laundering schemes because where is the money on the screen? Practical sets, camerawork, and action sequences make all the difference in the world and make its stakes feel larger than life, even with a smaller budget than many large-scale blockbusters. There isn’t a single second where The Hunger Games doesn’t feel suspenseful, partly due to Lawrence and Willems crafting some truly memorable and jaw-dropping setpieces that beg to be witnessed on IMAX.
It wouldn’t be honest to say that The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is perfect. It’s not without minor storytelling flaws, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the original Hunger Games and Mockingjay - Part 2, which concluded the Katniss Everdeen saga on a whimper. There shouldn’t be any more Hunger Games spinoffs and prequels, as Collins only wrote another book to complement the leading franchise, but the machine will probably greenlight some more at some point. As it stands, however, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes may very well be the best installment of the franchise yet, an emotionally gripping and meditative study of how the innate nature of evil slowly takes root and corrupts even the ones with the most noble of intentions. As Sutherland’s Snow himself says in Mockingjay - Part 2: “It’s the things we love most that destroy us.”