"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" - Film Review
It feels strange to lump The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in with the latest wave of nostalgia-driven filmmaking. We shouldn’t have warm, fuzzy feelings for a series of books and movies about a children’s annual fight to the death. The original trilogy of books, written by Suzanne Collins, was inspired by channel surfing. Collins went from reality TV competitions to the horrors of war on broadcast news with just the press of a button. That was back in 2008, and the blurred lines between entertainment and trauma have only grown. Look no further than the influx of true-crime content that floods every medium. In that sense, this return to the world of Panem and the Hunger Games had the potential to feel urgent and relevant to our culture again. However, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is missing the bite needed to make a meaningful statement about our obsession with putting trauma on display.
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Collins’ original trilogy and the prequel novel that’s the source for The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes are angry works of fiction. They’re indictments of our society and a magnifying glass on the horrors of war. For the largely teenage audience the books were marketed to, The Hunger Games didn’t shy away from the reality of abuses of power, self-preservation in bleak scenarios, and propaganda. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is our introduction to Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) as a young man. As an adult, the audience knows him as the looming villain played by Donald Sutherland. This prequel is meant to explain how a person becomes a fascist dictator, but, if anything, it softens Snow.
The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes takes place during the 10th Annual Hunger Games. It is by no means the spectacle we were first introduced to in the world of Panem. In fact, Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), the head Gamemaker, is struggling to reinvent the Hunger Games because viewership is low. One of the plans to inspire people to watch is to assign each Tribute a mentor from the Capitol. The mentors are the children of the best and brightest, Snow being one of them. He’s assigned to the Tribute from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). She quickly gains prominence when she sings at the Reaping ceremony.
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The problem with a prequel that is written after the original is that the prequel has the immense burden of squeezing itself into a history that didn’t exist before. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is no different. The film has to constantly twist and turn itself to allow The Hunger Games trilogy to exist. It begs the question, why is Snow the character we’re forced to follow? Why must we give him the spotlight? He’s by far the least interesting character we’re presented with, and he isn’t the only option Collins had. There’s Snow’s cousin, Tigris (Hunter Schafer), who would later work with Katniss and rebel against the Capitol. Her perspective, as someone who is related to Snow but ends up on the opposite side of the spectrum, would be a fascinating viewpoint. Or Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera), who grew up in District 2 but moved to the Capitol because his father became rich as a weapons manufacturer. He’s an angry and outspoken opponent of the Games and constantly at odds with Snow.
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Then there’s the issue of the love story. As Snow acts as Lucy Gray’s mentor, the two fall in love. A romance is not unfamiliar in The Hunger Games trilogy, but in the original, at least the writing gave the space for Katniss, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) to feel the effects of war. Lucy Gray is a prime example of a manic pixie dream girl who never seems to be impacted by the fact that she has been selected to fight to the death. Zegler turns in a strong performance, but can only do so much because of the way her character is written. The romance between Snow and Lucy Gray is a distraction from what should be the film’s central themes of oppression, war, and systems of power. It doesn’t help that this backstory of Snow answers no questions about his beginnings as a fascist dictator, nor is it particularly romantic.
The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is immensely bloated, with a full hour left in the runtime after the Games end. The film and the source book are entirely out of their depth as they try to explain how we get from the 10th Annual Hunger Games to the spectacle Snow has created by the 74th. There’s still space in this world for the lessons The Hunger Games can teach us about the way we consume media and news, but The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is not clear enough in its vision to be as impactful as its predecessors.
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