If you can believe it, it’s been eight long years since The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, the final installment of Lionsgate’s star-studded tetralogy, largely put an end to the young adult movie trend. Unnecessarily bisected into two majorly distended installments – as was the trend at the time – Mockingjay was a last, belabored breath of respectability for a subgenre rife with endlessly diminishing returns. Franchises such as The Maze Runner faded out into relative obscurity. The Divergent movies were so bad they never even got an ending. But The Hunger Games, portentously bleak and sanitized as the movies could be, was always pretty decent. The series’ second installment, Catching Fire, is even pretty good. Housed within the trappings of Suzanne Collins’ adolescent fiction were the rudimentary components of some persuasive political subtext, furnished with enough worldbuilding and inspired casting choices (Lenny Kravitz, anyone?) to make them a compelling watch, even if you weren’t 13-years-old.
Which brings us to The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Possibly the least catchy movie title of the year, but maybe the most pleasant surprise. Based on Collins’ 2020 novel, this belated prequel tells the story of a young Cornelius Snow (Tom Blyth), later the series’ unabashedly evil antagonist. At 18, however, he’s a decidedly more complex fellow. Hailing from a prestigious family since weakened by the war, the orphaned Cornelius is on the precipice of winning the Plinth Prize, a grant that will pay his way through university and hopefully restore his family to prosperity. However, a last-minute change by the founder of the games, Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), adds a wrinkle to his plans: to prove his worth, he must mentor a tribute from one of the districts for the 10th Annual Hunger Games, an annual tradition that has been rapidly losing viewership. His tribute is Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a talented musician from District 12 whose musical abilities he soon realizes could be used not only to change his future, but that of the games, forever.
There’s plenty going on The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes over the course of its 157-minute runtime. On one hand, the film is tasked with successfully guiding Cornelius from wide-eyed idealist to ruthless future dictator. On the other, Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt’s screenplay again returns to the notion of turning tragedy into spectacle, exploring how brutally uneven power structures can be enacted and widely accepted to justify people’s innate bloodlust in times of dissent. The most enthralling aspect of The Hunger Games was always how each of the tributes was marketed as a public figure in order to garner potential sympathy from their oppressors. In Songbirds and Snakes, however, the games have not yet become such an exaggerated display of the capital’s opulence. Instead, the practice is simply a brute form of sadistic punishment, in which tributes are literally thrown into a barren concrete arena to duke it out with whatever blunt weaponry is at their disposal. It’s undeniably nasty business and returning director Francis Lawrence manages to make the violence feel decently brutish, despite its typically bloodless PG-13 editing. Stripped of the complicated machinery of the original’s high-tech arenas, this is the first time the titular “Hunger Games” have felt genuinely nasty.
Bleak subject matter aside, it’s also a lot more fun than its predecessors. The cinematography by Jo Willems relies far less on the handheld camerawork that defined the originals “serious” feel. This is both an attribute and a flaw, since the movie lacks the grit that made Lawrence’s prior entries memorable, but relishes much more in its inherently evocative production design. Lawrence knows how to frame a picture, and his images speak far more powerfully than Lesslie and Arndt’s clunky script – one particular moment, involving a hanging and birds, is particularly off-putting. As with the previous films, the supporting performances are highly enjoyable. Viola Davis shamelessly devours every bit of scenery as head game maker Dr. Volumnia Gaul. Outfitted with colored eye contacts and a bizarre wardrobe, her villainous turn is campy but never obnoxious. Jason Schwartzman is similarly humorous as Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman, a smarmy talk show entertainer who serves as the host of the games. Blythe doesn’t display a ton of range, but he’s a watchable and visually striking lead. Euphoria breakout Hunter Schafer also appears as Snow’s cousin, Tigris, but is mostly sidelined. Of the younger cast, Zegler is arguably the film’s highlight. There’s a surprising number of musical sequences that allow the singer/actress to show off her impressive vocal range. Her singing is a refreshing dose of energy to the occasionally slow-paced narrative. It must be said, however, that any compliments on her voice cannot be granted to her attempt at a heartland accent.
It’s a shame about the script. While not bereft of solid ideas, the screenplay contains some real clunkers when it comes to the dialogue. “Folks around here call it ‘swamp potato’,” Zegler states at one point, referring to a plant, “I prefer to call it by its real name, Katniss.” Woof. These clumsy attempts at callbacks, or rather call-forwards, not only make no sense contextually, but also veer certain sequences into the realm of unintentional comedy. There’s also the issue of Snow’s character arc. At one point, after committing an act of brutal violence under duress, Snow admits that the experience made him feel “powerful.” This all leads to a rather unsatisfying ending that has all the emotional impact of Darth Vader’s comical “NOOOOOOOOOO” from the conclusion of Revenge of the Sith. It’s not quite enough to sink the experience, but the cheesiness serves as an unfortunate reminder that these are, indeed, young adult movies with all the fan service pandering that description entails.
Though laden with some abject flaws, the aforementioned corniness chief amongst them, Songbirds and Snakes may still be the best Hunger Games movie simply by virtue of being a bit different. There’s a very reasonable argument to be made that we didn’t need another one of these in general, but that’s a criticism rather decently baked into the premise itself. It takes place in a world where the Hunger Games are dying. No one is watching them anymore, so they need to be made cooler, sleeker, sexier even. The cinematic landscape has changed a lot in the past decade, so a shift in tonality was necessary to make this prequel feel fresh. It recalls the flaws of the YA era, but also improves upon them by putting itself at a more clinical distance from what it critiques. Whereas the original films ironically marketed themselves with the same propaganda-esque imagery that they sought to criticize, Songbirds and Snakes doesn’t try to wear its revolutionary iconography as a marketing strategy. It simply seeks to tell an entertaining story with decent characters, and it paints a more compelling portrait of Panem in the process. Collins no doubt believes that her work has something profound to say about her protagonist’s gradual acceptance, and ultimate embrace, of authoritarianism, but like the film’s piercingly obvious final line, it’s all rather surface level. But it’s nice to see a big budget blockbuster this earnest return to the mainstream amidst an era defined by self-referential irony, and that’s honestly enough. Let the games begin, again.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
The post The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes appeared first on Spectrum Culture.