Director – Francis Lawrence, Screenplay – Michael Arndt & Michael Lesslie, Based on the Novel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes by Suzanne Collins, Producers – Nina Jacobson, Francis Lawrence & Brad Simpson, Photography – Jo Willems, Music – James Newton Howard, Visual Effects Supervisor – Adrian de Wet, Visual Effects – Ghost VFX (Supervisor – Martin Gardeler), Important Looking Pirates (Supervisor – Marko Ljubez), Outpost VFX (Supervisor – Sheen Yap) & Rise VFX (Supervisor – Erik Schneider), Special Effects Supervisor – Claudius Rauch, Prosthetic Makeup Design – Jörn Seifert, Production Design – Uli Hanisch. Production Company – Color Force/About: Blank Productions/Studio Babelsberg.
Cast
Tom Blyth (Coriolanus Snow), Rachel Zegler (Lucy Gray Baird), Peter Dinklage (Dean Casca Highbottom), Viola Davis (Dr. Volumnia Gaul), Josh Andres Rivera (Sejanus Plinth), Jason Schwartzman (Lucky Flickerman), Burn Gorman (Commander Hoff), Hunter Schafer (Tigris), Ashley Liao (Clemensia Dovecote), Fionnula Flanagan (Grandma’am), Zoe Renee (Lysistrata Vickers), Jerome Lance (Marcus), Mackenzie Lansing (Coral), Irene Böhm (Lamina), Max Raphael (Festus Creed), Lilly Cooper (Arachne Crane), Nick Benson (Jessup), Dimitri (Reaper), Knox Gibbon (Bobbin), Isobel Jesper Jones (Mayfair Lipp), Dakota Shapiro (Billy Taupe), Marc Aden Gray (Mayor Lipp)
Plot
It is the tenth Hunger Games. A young Coriolanus Snow is assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird, the tribute from District 12, and is impressed by her when she stands up during her selection to sing a song. The Head Gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul warns the mentors that the Hunger Games are dying out due to lack of audience involvement. Coriolanus believes it is because nothing is done to personalise and get audiences to identify with the tributes. Coriolanus makes a point of riding into the city with the tributes and then gets up before the cameras to introduce Lucy. He proposes to Volumnia a scheme of sponsorship where audiences can send tributes gifts and other means of promotion, which she agrees to implement. At the same time, Coriolanus is attracted to Lucy and intervenes in a number of ways to aid her as she is placed into the Hunger Games arena to fight to the death.
Adapted from a series of Young Adult novels by Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games franchise was one of the biggest series of the 2010s. The film series began with The Hunger Games (2012). Director Francis Lawrence then entered the series to make all of the sequels, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015). Several years after the end of the film series, Suzanne Collins revisited Panem with a prequel book The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2020). This was duly made into a film here with Francis Lawrence again returning to the director’s chair.
While some of the individual films were okay, I remain largely indifferent to The Hunger Games as an IP. It is nothing more than a rehash of other future gladiatorial games films like The Tenth Victim (1965), The Prize of Peril (1983), The Running Man (1987) and most obviously Battle Royale (2000) having been given a Young Adult spin and lots of cheering about revolution, while avoiding any real ideological depth. I felt zero investment in the characters and world of Panem to care sufficiently about a backstory that explored everything. Certainly, that was not to be the case for some of the younger audiences at the time the films came out, which may well be born out in the reasonable box-office performance of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, with it earning some $329 million worldwide.
Some of the other Hunger Games films were watchable but never made it higher than 2.5 stars for me, but I was prepared to give The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes the benefit of the doubt. One of the pluses of the film is lead actor Tom Blyth who gives a strong and assured performance as the young Coriolanus, even if I failed when I tried to screw up my eyes and imagine him as growing into the character played by Donald Sutherland – he just seems to empathetic and drawn to defying the system.
Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) and Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler)
There is also an entertainingly bizarre performance from Viola Davis, made up like as kind of cross between a deranged drag queen and a plastic surgery accident, even if it feels as though she has strayed in from an entirely different film altogether. Rachel Zegler, the find from Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021), is okay, especially when she comes to life during the song numbers, although tends to get overshadowed by some of the bigger acting names around her during the rest of the show.
The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes gains a reasonable interest during the scenes where Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler are on screen and he is trying to aid her win the games. Apparently, despite being in the future, the art of cultivating television ratings has been lost to history. In a very 2020s touch, Coriolanus Snow essentially becomes this world’s first image and marketing consultant, which must be the first for a hero in a film. The film worked okay when it gave us a likeable couple to root for against the system and watch the ways Coriolanus acted to subvert it.
These scenes do however require some improbable pieces of deux ex machina plotting – that the drones used to deliver supplies are unstable and can be repurposed as makeshift missiles; the elimination of entrants by Rachel Zegler managing to poison their water bottles while their backs are turned; and the winning of the Games that involves being able to drop a handkerchief into a container of rainbow snakes. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes works less well during its last third where it feels as though Suzanne Collins remembered that she had to still turn Coriolanus into a bad guy and adds an extended section that diverts off to have him being involved with rebel activity while in District 12 and suddenly develop a sternly disapproving attitude.
