Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as his mentee, Lucy Gray, in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” (Lionsgate via AP)
Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as his mentee, Lucy Gray, in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” (Lionsgate via AP)
REVIEW:
Two hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a “ballad” - but you can’t call it The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes now, can you?
Concision was never much in favour in the four Hunger Games films, which reached a seeming finale with 2015′s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2. The intervening years have done nothing to shrink the ambitions of this unapologetically gaudy dystopic series, where the brutal deaths of kids are watched over by outrageously styled Capitol denizens with names like Effie Trinket.
That clash of YA allegory and colour palette is just as pronounced, if not more so, in The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel set 64 years before the original books, and adapted from Suzanne Collins’ 2020 book of the same name.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which opens in New Zealand theatres on November 16, is an origin story of the Hunger Games themselves, as well as numerous characters — primarily the devious President Coriolanus Snow, played by Donald Sutherland in the first four films. Here, Snow is an impoverished but opportunistic 18-year-old student played by Tom Blyth.
Just as in the Hunger Games films led by Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, the new one proves how much you can sacrifice in a story when you’ve got a thrilling young performer commanding the screen.
Francis Lawrence’s prequel often wobbles, especially in the early going. And yet, in the end, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, propelled by Blyth’s performance, manages to be the deepest expression yet of the series’ melodrama of adolescence. In Panem, the only thing more tragic than the suffering inflicted by adults on the young may be a bright kid warping wickedly into one of those elders, too.
That generational divide was always at the heart of the appeal of The Hunger Games, a fantasy where no adult or institution can be trusted, and the normal pressures of teendom are amplified in a modern, televised Roman Coliseum — an American Idol with murder — concocted by elders. It’s madness shrugged off as, “That’s just the way it is.”
Hunter Schafer as Tigris Snow, cousin of Coriolanus, in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” (Lionsgate via AP)
As the students gather amid Third Reich architectures (the production design by Uli Hanisch is stellar) and the games’ founder Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, majestic in blue, with a turquoise eye) gazes on, Coriolanus is assigned his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, a bold young woman from District 12 (also the home of Katniss) who wears a rainbow skirt and sports a dubious Southern accent. During the reaping ceremony, she makes an immediate impression, putting a snake down the back of a rival and bursting into song for the cameras. See, now there’s concision, I thought. You get your songbird and snake, straight off.
Lawrence’s Katniss was a thrilling female warrior whose seizing of centre stage had reverberations off-screen, paving the way for blockbuster female protagonists. Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray is inevitably a disappointment by comparison. Francis Lawrence’s film, scripted by Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, has the stale feeling of an unneeded retread. The tonal fluctuations, always a tricky balance in Panem, can be ridiculous. The stadium is abruptly bombed by unseen rebels. Once the games begin, one tribute concocts rabies.
Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Viola Davis as Volumnia Gaul play nuanced, complex characters in the Hunger Games prequel. (Lionsgate via AP)
The main thing holding our attention at this point is Jason Schwartzman’s Lucretius Flickerman, a TV host with a Salvador Dali moustache who wants the games wrapped up just so he can make his dinner reservations. (It’s been a very good year for Schwartzman, who transformed himself in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and transmogrified in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. )
But Songbirds and Snakes sneakily begins making a case for itself. The relationship between Coriolanus and Lucy Gray is compellingly complex. He works desperately to help her survive the games because he believes in her, and maybe loves her, but also because her success benefits him, too. Whether Lucy Gray is as pure-hearted as her songs, too, is up for debate. Both, we sense, are cunningly playing the hands they’ve been dealt, seeking an advantage where they can. When Coriolanus begins making suggestions for the games to Volumnia, he proves himself a natural-born marketer.
That there’s tension in Coriolanus’ character, considering we know how he ultimately ends up, is a tribute to just how good Blyth is. We’ve seen by now plenty of prequels that show us how some famous villain broke bad, but there’s nothing in Blyth’s performance that telegraphs his future. He’s a sincere striver — we root for him because of his poverty and his puck — who’s operating in the society he’s found himself. He’s a villain born entirely of circumstance.
Peter Dinklage as Casca Highbottom, dean of the Academy, in “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” (Lionsgate via AP)
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes extends the saga for a third act that takes place in District 12, an addition that another franchise might have saved for the next instalment. But it’s also where the tragedy of The Hunger Games and Coriolanus’ fate earn some of the Shakespearean touches that have liberally been sprinkled throughout. (Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is likewise about an ambiguous warrior set amid times of famine and class struggle.)
The Hunger Games kicked off a YA craze in film that had its ups and downs but petered out several years ago. Whether The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder of how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a Lionsgate release, is rated M by the Film and Video Labelling Body of New Zealand (FVLB) for drug use & violence
