REVIEW: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Leaves Much To Be Desired
Book to film adaptations are nothing new, but sometimes books are better left on the page rather than coming to life onscreen. This is unfortunately the case with Lionsgate’s new film, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snake. Based on the book by Suzanne Collins, and a prequel to her hit The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes follows a young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) as he journeys from a young student in the Capital to the tyrannical President of Panem that fans meet sixty some odd years later in The Hunger Games series.
Chosen to mentor District 12 tribute, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), Snow must do whatever it takes to ensure she makes it out of the Games alive because it is not just her life on the line, but his future in the Capital as well. Lucy Gray may not seem like the ideal candidate for the Games, but her voice and personality has a way of immediately captivating anyone around her, including the single-minded Snow. As Snow gets to know Lucy Gray ahead of the trials, he must decide if he willing to let his feelings towards her distract him from his ultimate goal of dragging his family out of poverty, and back into their once prestigious life in the Capital.
Told in three parts, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes spends too much time trying to be a spectacle rather than tell the story of how Snow becomes a villain. There are not enough scenes in the film that showcase the internal battle Snow has against himself. There are no details or explanations about why he is doing what he is doing or his motivations. As a person who did not read the book, when you have to Google what happened in the book after watching the movie to fill in the hundreds of questions you have, there is a blaring problem. It was as if the writing team expected the audience to have already read the book prior to the screening and that the audience would be capable of filling in the gaps themselves. In two and a half hours, the creative team should have had more than enough time to accurately tell this story, but instead they chose this time to focus on minute things like the Games. Yes, one of the reasons audiences will tune into this movie is to see how the Games differ from the ones featured in The Hunger Games movies, however you don’t need to spend almost an entire hour in the Games.
The film also relies too heavily on the various musical numbers. The last half of the movie felt like a completely different movie, it felt more like a musical than an fantasy drama. Don’t get me wrong, Zegler has an amazing voice, and sounded absolutely beautiful singing the songs featured throughout the movie. But these musical moments could have been interchanged for scenes that were focused on building the relationship between Snow and Lucy Gray from mentor/mentee to lovers.
Blyth and Zegler were perfect choices to play Snow and Lucy Gray. However, there wasn’t enough character development for either character to really showcase their talents. Peter Dinklage’s Dean Highbottom and Viola Davis’s Dr. Volumnia Gaul also suffered from the lack of development. The two play the “villain” role so well but weren’t given enough meat to truly terrify. I had so many questions about why their characters were the way they were that could have easily been answered in one or two scenes.
Fans new and old will head out this weekend to see The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snake regardless of whether or not I think the movie was good. But many will most likely come out a little disappointed. I highly recommend waiting until it comes out on streaming in 2024. If you are insistent about seeing it on the big screen, be prepared to have a lot of questions when all is said and done, especially for those who have not read the book.
Grade: C