"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" Review: A Pointless Return to a Gutted Franchise

I volunteer as tribute... to never see this movie again.

November 21, 2023

On May 31, 2000, CBS premiered Survivor. An experiment with little expectation of success, it quickly blossomed into a juggernaut; the first season steadily grew an audience over the summer, averaging 28 million viewers. The finale was the second-most watched non-Superbowl broadcast of its decade, averaging 51.7 million viewers. Twenty-three years later, the show is still on, having undergone numerous alterations to… survive. It looks wildly different than it did that May 2000 day, overloaded with twists, and equipped with progressively more game-aware (if not necessarily game-savvy) casts.

If one found the show now, they'd be shocked if they went back to the beginning, perhaps put off by the slower pace and bare-bones production of older seasons. This principle explains why the horribly-titled The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes fails:

Once we know what something can be, we don’t necessarily want to see how it was.

The issues of the latest (and pointless) installment of the Hunger Games franchise are innumerable, but they begin with that simple truth. The original film, adapted from the YA phenomenon by Suzanne Collins, had everything working in its favor. Released during that misguided craze, it starred a young, Oscar-nominated actress and two hunky, familiar young actors: one engaged to Miley Cyrus, the other from several beloved kids movies its target demographic recalled fondly.

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Moreover, it offered an intriguing premise, even if its source material was badly-written and poorly fleshed out: 24 kids between 12-18, forced by their oppressive government to fight to the death in an arena before a nationally televised audience.

Yet, it didn’t rest on its laurels; the movie was compelling, not only because of Jennifer Lawrence’s quiet power in bringing heroine Katniss Everdeen to life, but because, and this cannot be said about its YA counterparts, it actually tried. It had a mood, both in its narrative and the aesthetic it set from the opening scenes in District 12 to the final cut to black. The stakes felt high, with so much anticipation built before Katniss entered the arena that the initial bloodbath - though shot in a comfy, PG-13 embrace - set us on edge from start to finish.

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It was a tall order to make the film adaptation of Collins’ unnecessary prequel feel worthwhile. One could thus excuse how middling it is, except that, even at a $100 million budget, it feels like Francis Lawrence, who directed three of the four original films, didn’t even try.

We initially see it at the reaping, where District 12’s Lucy Gray Baird gets selected as the female tribute for the 10th games, 64 years before the first film. She hears her name with stone-cold defiance and slowly walks to the stage before the film reveals she’s carrying a snake, which she shoves down the shirt of a nearby snickering girl. Commotion ensues, and upon arriving on stage, the girl's father, the district’s mayor, slaps her. A song starts in the crowd as Lucy looks out dramatically at her people, and she belts along like a melodramatic songstress plucked straight from a corny American Idol audition. She curtsies smugly, turns to the Peacekeepers, says, “Let’s go, boys,” and is taken inside.

The setting lacks the gritty, run-down presentation of the original film, replacing the gray colors and sounds of gravel crunching beneath the childrens’ feet with a warmly-colored sky and polished aesthetic, which is bad enough. Even worse? Our heroine immediately feels fake.

She’s fictional, but within her world, she’s real, and no one would behave this way under her circumstances. Katniss emotionally volunteers for her younger sister in a panic and thus immediately feels like a tangible, relatable protagonist; Lucy shoves a snake down a girl’s clothes, puts on a Christina Aguilera-esque showboat performance, then talks to the Peacekeepers like a small-town bar wench; she's teenage fanfiction.

This inattention to detail and disregard for realism almost feel like a warning that if we entered with high hopes, we should lower them immediately. Teenage Snow, a questionable choice for protagonist in book or movie form, is immediately established as the character with an actual journey - securing a prestigious grant to pull his family out of poverty and send him to university - but even the most conceptually compelling journeys are lackluster if headed by the wrong character.

Setting aside our baggage, he's unclear. The movie is just as bloodless inside the mind of its protagonist as it is in the physical action; it does not want to commit to the ruthless sociopathy we see in the original series, so it teeters between Snow being an honorable young man intent on helping his family while creating a better life for himself and being an opportunistic scoundrel who believes the ends always justify the means.

It’s unfortunate, because if his internal monologue got fleshed out on screen, Snow would feel more consistent. His affection for Lucy would feel equal parts genuine and exploitative; his helping her in the Games would feel just as self-serving and sacrificial. Unfortunately, the movie cannot decide how best to tackle the subject. It could’ve made Snow a classical anti-hero whose logic forces us to question how ardently we can object to his actions. It could’ve made him indecisive about selecting between two equal but contradictory parts of his psyche, forced the narrative to make him decisive, and inflicted the consequences. Instead, it's indecisiveness cripples it. In the end, he's a man driven mad by a girl.

How original.

Of course, the film falters long before. The 74th Games from the first film, while nothing compared to the Quarter Quell from the second, immerse us. They play out in a forest, uniform in color but spacious and capable of playing host to the drama.

The arena for the 10th games is a snapshot of the Games before they became more polished, and the creators knew how to present their product, but that didn’t have to mean something lackluster. The arena is minuscule, the tributes packed in within feet of each other; the cornucopia contains virtually nothing, and the setting, an amphitheater in the Capitol, lacks the physical separation from the Capitol to hammer home the power it wields over the Districts. It’s just a place with a few tunnels and some air ducts. It doesn’t feel like an arena, even within its thematic aims.

The Games’ primary villain, District 4's Coral, is as thinly imagined as Clove and Cato from the first film. But while they carried a silent gravitas, a spiritual stature that towered over the film, Coral is just some dweeby-looking girl who wants to kill. One could argue that all of this, including the more manic, frenzied nature of the initial bloodbath, speaks to the less refined approach of the Capitol in the Games’ early days and allows for a more visceral reaction to the inexperienced tributes’ bloody demises. Unfortunately, that can only feel tangible if the film forces those demises upon us instead of cutting away from the violence or at least tries to conjure those feelings of anticipation that made the first film’s bloodbath so brutal. It’s moments like these we miss Gary Ross’ shaky cam.

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We still suffer the cheesy or uninspired characterization of the original films, like a one-armed child, the big black guy from 11, and his miniature district partner, so cartoonishly sickly it earns a chuckle or two. But more than anything else, we don’t feel that these children have a strong concept of what they’re facing; the games and everything before are so rushed that we don’t get the sense of looming dread the first film offers. Everything just happens, like the movie knows we’ve been here before and thus feels it pointless to try to inspire those same emotions in its characters or audience.

It doesn’t help that the story aims for commentary on how far a producer will go for ratings; the Games are a punishment for the war that nearly destroyed Panem, which is why the original series could do anything it attempted.

If Collins wanted to explore something new, she should’ve created something new. No one will buy that the Games went from a ratings ploy that served the Capitol no purpose to a punishment for a war that ended 74 years prior. It makes no sense. Nothing in this movie makes sense.

Thus, once we leave the Games, we’re stuck with a drawn-out experience that rehashes what makes the movie a slog. Lucy returns to District 12, absent the trauma that plagued Katniss but with many more songs, and if she used less melismatic runs and incessant belting, she’d feel less like a cartoon character. If she (or her District, for that matter) treated her return with a sense of relief or triumph instead of “I’m back, y’all!” the dire need to flee 12, which unfolds in a bizarre escape plot that randomly stitches together previous enemies, would have a sense of urgency.

Alas, that need for explanation, and thus legitimization, is lacking, which makes the narrative around Snow frustrating. His turn to the man we know never feels earned, mostly because he didn’t turn. He was just floating around, a victim of how devoted the movie was to developing his character at any given moment. Turning on his closest friend, Sejanus, the most irritating, naive do-gooder in movie history, is a critical choice, but the movie refuses to make it one.

At first, it’s clear that Snow struggles with his friend's intended treason but then commits to using the Jabberjays to expose him. Later, the film implies it was accidental before mostly committing to it being intentional as it shoves Snow from manipulative to crazed and murderous. It’s such an insane ride over such little time that it does nothing but remind us how poorly the movie established any of its ideas or ambitions, leaving no time to legitimize them when it mattered most. The entire world feels colorless, not in aesthetic but in essence; no setting, character, action, or development has any weight behind it, surging it forward, working to leave an impression.

It’s a cop-out to pawn it all off on it being a deep-dive into Hunger Games history, long before the Capitol discovered how to market the Games; Survivor: Borneo is still compelling to rewatch 23 years and 44 seasons later because CBS could do their job from the outset: they simply got better at it.

Songbirds and Snakes has no excuse. It could’ve been a great movie, but aside from the Hunger Games having run its cultural course, it suffers from Collins’ ineptitude and Francis Lawrence's laziness. We don’t want to watch things in reverse. We don’t want to see how a sausage got made. But most of all, we don’t want a lesser version of what we’ve seen before.