What is the root of evil? In the YA fiction genre, storytellers often source it to bad breakups and torn friendships, which can transform Prince Charming into the Prince of Darkness. Plain evil isn’t engaging, but evil for evil’s sake can be wildly compelling, at least in this category, where a bad situationship is a go-to backstory for many a ruthless dictator. So it is both unsurprising yet disappointing that The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, the latest adaptation from author Suzanne Collins’ young adult dystopian saga, leans heavily into this trope.
Directed by franchise veteran Francis Lawrence, Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes recounts the mildly entertaining but ultimately useless origins of villain Coriolanus Snow, played in the original films by the dynamic Donald Sutherland. In this new prequel, Snow is portrayed by the boyishly handsome Tom Blyth, and it isn’t bruised national pride or personal revenge that colors would-be autocrat Snow, it’s his broken heart, plus some of his own paranoia costing him peace.
Plotted across narrative roads so well-traveled you can make out the track marks left behind by others, Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes squanders a potentially rich premise and winds up as a stock-issue Romeo and Juliet riff with nothing new for the die-hard faithful or the curious newcomers. Despite deft work by Lawrence, who wrings a tiny bit of fun and pizzazz from this overproduced franchise tentpole, the very core of Collins’ storytelling—screenwriters Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt adapt her 2020 novel—means The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes isn’t singing a fresh tune that needed to be heard. It’s a hollow cover version that vanishes in the ether.
Set decades before the first movie, the one that made Jennifer Lawrence a star, The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes follows Corialanus Snow (Blyth), the proud son of a once-powerful dynasty suffering hard times in the aftermath of Panem’s rebellions. A star student and model citizen at 18, Snow is named mentor over a “Tribute” in the annual Hunger Games, a lottery-driven battle royale marking its 10th year. Snow is assigned to manage Lucy Gray, an angelic vision played by Rachel Zegler, sporting something of a nondescript period American Southern accent.
Far from a physical combatant, Lucy Gray’s best asset is her voice and her ability to utilize it as a hypnotic singer (Zegler indeed has pipes, which the film takes complete advantage of). She’s also cunning and tastefully petty, unafraid to drop snakes in the blouse of her ex’s new girl and to observe enemies from afar. With the Hunger Games little more than televised death matches with forgettable participants, Snow, looking to ensure Lucy Gray’s survival and cement his future, engineers a new strategy to elevate the games into Panem’s premier cultural event and leverage its audiences’ feelings for bigger ratings.
Half star-crossed romance and half commentary on the devious nature of mass entertainment, The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes upholds The Hunger Games’ franchise tradition as an R-rated dystopia with the sheen of a PG-13 tentpole. The movie opens even earlier on a very young Snow, introduced as a child running over rubble and dead bodies and hiding from scavengers. Later, during the actual Hunger Games event, screaming children with cherubic faces get the IMAX treatment as they dodge drones and run from bigger kids with spears. This sort of atrocious imagery is juxtaposed with the game show aspects of the competition. (Supporting actor Jason Schwartzmann appears as a delightful distraction, playing a vapid on-camera host.)
Collins’ saga has always been contradictory, being a massive series about humanity’s inclination for barbarism. The origins for her books, so Collins has said, was channel surfing during the Bush Jr. years and finding an unsettling blur between Iraq invasion footage and reality TV. While author Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale, itself made into a cult film in 2000, brilliantly explored something similar, Collins saw her story through a distinct post-9/11 lens with her emphasis on the West’s obsession with celebrity and the power of propaganda. The Hunger Games is all about televised misery, authoritarianism, the blood cost to shape a better world, and the discomforting shade of the Venn Diagram they share. It’s only The Hunger Games’ own blinding success as a massive IP that threatens to derail the value inherent to its messaging.
Songbirds And Snakes strives to deepen Collins’ original ideas, brazen in their own exploration of how real people who are pummeled into characters for mass consumption can be as dehumanized as the Hunger Games itself. Sadly Songbirds And Snakes never interrogates its most provocative themes, choosing only to lay them bare and point to them without much else. The film mostly meanders in its other half as an ill-fated young adult romance, in which two beautiful people are doomed to never share a life. This tragic love story launches a smokescreen over Songbirds And Snakes’ more compelling threads, and how rich it is that The Hunger Games is distracted from what’s important by what’s juicier.
Songbirds And Snakes misses hard, but it is still semi-competent as sappy fluff. Snow and Lucy Gray are indeed made for each other but not meant to be, with Blyth and Zegler sharing enough chemistry to make it believable that they connect over divisions. (They all get a much-needed alley-oop from Lawrence, who knows how to use his cameras in close-up frames to make both of them just lovely together.) Songbirds And Snakes ultimately lives and dies by one’s tolerance for the ever-reliable but painfully predictable YA convention of two people who could enjoy happiness, if they lived in a totally different reality.
While skillfully made on technical levels, Songbirds And Snakes is thematically inert and uninspired, particularly in an era when everything from Star Wars to DC’s Joker have laboriously sought to find the same sympathy in its devils. It’s not that doomed romances aren’t fun—Titanic made billions of dollars, remember—but Songbirds And Snakes is little more than big media IP entering its own caustic phase of regurgitation. That it’s about conjuring unnecessary sympathy in an evil man is all the more baffling. To paraphrase a new Zoomer meme: Snow is 18 years old. He should have been at the club.