The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’ Assessment

It would’ve been really easy, and sure profitable, for Lionsgate to craft a prequel to The Hunger Games that simply let newcomer Tom Blyth, as young Coriolanus Snow, smolder his method by a forbidden romance with Rachel Zegler’s District 12 songstress Lucy Gray for 2 hours and name it a day. But nothing about Francis Lawrence’s The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is straightforward. Channeling Adam Driver extra usually than Donald Sutherland, Blyth’s model of Snow is a towering, asexual vulture of determined ambitions, stemming from the character’s household flirting with full chapter and his schooling at a fascist prep college the place commencement depends on what boils right down to a school-wide sport of Who Wants to Be a Eugenicist.

The college’s opioid-addicted headmaster, Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), declares that commencement depends on mentoring a Hunger Games tribute within the wonderful artwork of public relations. As it seems, after 9 years of televised homicide festivals, the Capitol is beginning to have second ideas about letting kids and youngsters kill one another for pleasure, and the upper ups in Panem’s authorities have hopes that the scholars can focus-group a strategy to as soon as once more strike rankings gold. And the pinnacle gamemaker of the tenth annual starvation video games is Dr. Volumnia Gaul, who, in Viola Davis’s vividly menacing palms suggests a cross between Rotwang from Metropolis and Ralph Fiennes’s Amon Göth from Schindler’s List.

Perhaps probably the most memorable “romance” in Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, which is tailored by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt from the Suzanne Collins novel, is between Gaul and Snow, who recommend sociopaths sharing a waltz by the ivory towers of Panem throughout their scenes collectively. Snow slowly however absolutely learns to see the frightened, genetically inferior prey inside each human being and manipulate it for the elite. What passes for a love scene within the context of the movie isn’t Snow rolling round in verdant fields with Lucy Gray, however Gaul dropping every part to seal up Snow’s intentionally ripped-open stitches after being attacked by a tribute.

That isn’t to say Zegler’s Lucy Gray isn’t a power to be reckoned with on her personal. Beyond possessing a robust, relentlessly defiant singing voice that the filmmakers properly put to make use of early and infrequently, Lucy Gray is wise sufficient to know that she’s being manipulated, and solely offers an inch when it turns into apparent that her mentor, Coriolanus Snow, is one mistake away from ending up within the gutter alongside her. Though candy towards one another, their relationship performs out with a exceptional quantity of subtlety and crafty—the “moves and countermoves” that Sutherland gravely intoned about throughout the unique movies. Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is rarely so careless as to telegraph to the viewers whether or not Snow’s concern over seeing Lucy within the video games is about watching her in peril, or his desires being put in peril.

You can be forgiven for pondering that possibly it’s each. The hour-long midsection of Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes reveals us the Hunger Games competitors, and whereas this has sarcastically been the weakest a part of the sooner movies, this one advantages from the video games not having a finances for holograms, acid fog, and the like. As such, there’s not so much for the filmmakers to cover behind.

Here, it’s simply youngsters murdering one another in close-quarters fight in a crumbling, bombed-out area, and few R-rated horror movies launched in 2023 are as vicious as this one is. Tributes are often impaled. Poisonings are rampant. We witness a chronic operating arc of a tribute dying of rabies. Rebels are, ostensibly, crucified and mercy-killed. A very bloodthirsty tribute named Coral (Mackenzie Lansing) emerges as a terrifying, tooth-gnashing slasher villain. What passes for comedy reduction is Jason Schwartzman’s zealous efficiency as Lucky Flickerman, an amoral cartoon who delivers pitch-black jokes and declares the motion in between close-up magic demonstrations and the climate report.

In the center of all of it is Zegler, our “final girl” of types, and he or she performs that conventional horror film trope to a T. But Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes truly doesn’t cease when the video games have a winner. The third act is the place the movie is at its most blatantly novelistic—and, sure, at two hours and 45 minutes, only a wee bit longer than it ought to’ve been. This can also be the stretch the place The Hunger Games as a collection sheds its YA pores and skin fully. Here, it turns into a straight-up paranoid army spy drama set in Appalachia, with Snow’s final remaining vestiges of boyhood being intentionally ripped off—no totally different than these stitches he ripped out to see Gaul. Blyth’s gaze grows chilly, betrayals begin to mount, and each physique that drops is a grim shock.

The glue holding all of it collectively is identical that gave the sooner Hunger Games movies an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to treat different human beings as numbers and meat that should be placated to be helpful. There’s no artifice behind Snow’s remaining metamorphosis into the person we all know he turns into, and there shouldn’t be. Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes humanizes Coriolanus Snow for the only real function of emphasizing {that a} man, not some unknowable monster, was liable for all of this.