Making a fictional future dictator attractive and morally gray should be criminal.
The movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ 2020 novel “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” is a beautifully curated work of art, even though it made a fictional soon-to-be war criminal a little too handsome.
The movie is focused on the ever-hated dictator from the original series, President Coriolanus Snow of Panem, in his younger years. It also gives further introspection into the creation of The Hunger Games and plants the seeds of the revolution that we see in Collins’ other novels within the series.
We follow as Snow is assigned a tribute to mentor, a young woman from District 12 named Lucy Gray Baird.
The audience is presented with a grapple between the desire for power and love as the two starting characters fight for their lives in their own ways.
I stomped my way into a movie theater on Nov. 17, opening night, with my popcorn in hand and my heart prepared to break. I’m surprised I didn’t end up with mascara stains in my snacks by the time the credits rolled.
Lionsgate once again released a bullseye-hitting movie for “The Hunger Games” franchise that makes die-hard fans like me swoon.
The feature kept true to the previous installments within The Hunger Games universe, with dark themes and a thread weaving through the story that binds each movie together. Lionsgate broke the movie into three parts, much like the original novel by Collins, which allows the audience to easily follow the development and demise of Lucy Gray Baird’s and Coriolanus Snow’s horrific story.
While I adored the feature as a whole, it felt rushed.
The movie has a runtime of 2 hours and 38 minutes, which is a fairly short movie in comparison to the three hour behemoths I’m used to from the series.
While I rarely enjoy sitting in a theater for more than three hours, I would have happily booked out my entire afternoon for a longer version of “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”
All three segments lacked a lot of detail and important aspects that created character depth and development.
While I’m able to fill in the holes with context from the novel, many moviegoers don’t have the background needed to fully understand the dynamics of Snow, Baird and other supporting characters.
“The Mentor”
The first segment of the movie, “The Mentor,” focused on Snow’s involvement in The Hunger
Games and his experiences at the prestigious Capitol Academy, the equivalent of high school.
While a few characters from the book were cut from the movie, the ones that made it into the feature were watered down and lacked the depth that the book gave them.
There were complexities within the relationships between classmates and tributes that were nowhere to be found in the movie and made the overall sentiment weaker.
Collins illustrates a beautiful internal dialogue that gave readers a glimpse into the twisted and menacing nature of young Coriolanus Snow. The relationships between the characters could have acted as an expression of the lack of internal dialogue we see in the book from Snow.
While much of the detail from the novel I was hoping to see was cut, I still adored the first section of the movie. The sets were beautifully done, with imagery that reminded me of the 1930s and ‘50s along with gorgeous costumes.
Snow slowly believing that his tribute, District 12’s Lucy Gray Baird, could win the 10th annual Hunger Games is heart wrenching. It was even worse as I watched him fall in love with her, knowing how the story ends.
“The Prize”
The second section of the movie focuses on The Hunger Games and Baird’s subsequent winning of them.
Watching Snow risk his entire reputation and future for a woman from the districts that he claims to despise had my heart soaring.
I was rooting for Snow and Baird the entire second segment as if I didn’t know their fates.
Again, I adored the costuming, the sets and the music is absolutely intoxicating but the second section is even more rushed than the first.
Every decision I watched Snow make that led to his descent into madness felt rushed and unexplained. It seems as though the Lionsgate expected all of the audience to read the novel before settling into the theater’s seats.
I would have loved to see Snow and Sejanus, a very important side character, develop friendship. The lack of attention to the interactions between all other characters beside Baird and Snow is extremely prevalent during this segment.
It felt less like a movie about the dystopian world of The Hunger Games, and more the Snow and Baird show. I’m not complaining though, the actor who portrayed Snow is enthralling in his own right.
Casting my new-found Hollywood heartthrob Tom Blynth as the young Coriolanus Snow was a criminal act. The character is already compelling enough with his paranoia and cruelty without slapping a gorgeous face to the name.
Characters kept calling Blynth’s Snow gorgeous throughout the movie, and they weren’t wrong.
While this section felt rushed, what made it to the screen is incredibly entertaining and worth watching.
“The Peacekeeper”
After being caught cheating to ensure Baird’s win, Snow is exiled to be a peacekeeper, the military police of Panem. He is able to bribe his way into District 12 to have the chance to see Baird again, hoping she’s still alive after her victory.
In the third and last segment of the movie, the audience watches as Snow becomes entranced by Baird’s songs and personality even more.
This segment feels like the least rushed out of the three, with a lot of the character development happening during Snow and Baird’s moral conflicts.
My heart slowly broke while watching Snow betray the people who loved and trusted him most. I watched the final nail be driven into his morally corrupt coffin as he took the spot as heir to a family fortune after killing the family’s only son.
I was held on the edge of my seat the entire time despite knowing exactly what was going to happen in each scene.
While I was unsurprisingly upset by the ending of the movie, I think it gives incredible context as to why Snow has such a visceral reaction to Katniss Everdeen decades later.
I will absolutely watch this film again and probably re-read the entire series soon after just to find all of the hidden meanings and connections that Collins so expertly curated.
The soundtrack far exceeded my expectations. Each song emphasized the emotions of the scene and “Can’t Catch Me Now” by Olivia Rodrigo had me in tears.
Baird’s songs, sung by Rachel Zegler as she portrayed the character, were enchanting. Her mildly midwestern accent for the role gave the music a beautiful twang that had me thumping my feet like I was in the makeshift bar with everyone else on screen.
While she was a controversial actress before this role with her outward dislike toward a new rendition of Disney’s Snow White, she portrayed Lucy Gray Baird perfectly. I can’t imagine anyone else bringing the tragic story of Baird to the big screen better than Zegler.
I wish I could say I was one of the strong soldiers in the audience, not falling for both Snow and Baird, knowing how toxic they both were in their own way, but I wasn’t.
I try to justify my attraction to the soon-to-be-dictator Snow by saying he hadn’t committed war crimes yet. My “I can fix him” mentality apparently now extends to fictional men, which isn’t surprising.
I think this makes the movie all the more compelling actually, making the audience feel for and even fall for characters they know turn out to be horrible. I just need to re-read the original series to restore my hatred for the man with hair as icy as his heart.
