On the morning of the Reaping for the 10th Annual Hunger Games, Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) is distraught when he learns that the Plinth scholarship – of which he was a shoe-in – will no longer be awarded on scholastic merit, but rather will be given to the best mentor in this year’s games, a new role that will find the Academy students trying to boost viewership ratings of the Games across the Districts by promoting their assigned tribute. Coriolanus is assigned to the female tribute from District 12, a young singer with a fiery attitude, Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler). He is determined to do whatever it takes to win the prize, but when some of his tactics are deemed to be breaking the rules, he is sent to be a Peacekeeper grunt in the districts as punishment just as the rebellion is gaining steam. 

Francis Lawrence returns to Panem with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, 8 years removed from his last installment, Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015), and canonically set some 60 years prior to where the original trilogy started. Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt adapt the Suzanne Collins novel for Lionsgate, taking the 517 pages and turning it into a 3-chapter, 157-minute film; the longest so far of the franchise, though only by a slim 9-minute margin. The film has a lot of narrative ground to cover, essentially a synthetization of the earlier arcs, so it fills the runtime with a good bit of action and seldom slows down as Coriolanus takes the first steps on his political journey that will result in his eventual election as President and Lucy Gray operates as a precursor to the spirit of rebellion which Katniss Everdeen will have reignited at the 74th running of the Games.  

The film mostly follows Coriolanus who will grow to be a chief antagonist in the proper cycle. As such, Songbirds and Snakes has a lot of heavy lifting to do on the page, and Blyth has a very demanding role to play up the stakes in the action since there is no question about his survival. While the film does set up some passing references to what is to come, for the most part, it does stand on its own merits which is a big plus. That being said, everything passes through Blyth’s character and the poor actor suffers some real tonal and emotional whiplash as the bloated plot unfolds and filmmakers seem in total disagreement on how to handle this central character. Stylistically he ranges from an anime villain with curly, bleach-blonde hair to a truly horrendous buzz cut, and the actor is clumsily sexualized in a way that feels forced and uncomfortable every time the camera lands on him in various states of undress. Moment to moment, however, the actor does well in the scene, but the stiff dialogue and sheer scope on the page do make it hard for him to form a full and coherent performance. This is most apparent in the final throws of the narrative when the preceding events galvanize him to become a ruthless leader and proponent of the Games, but the resolution is almost immediate and do not track leaving Blyth little else to do but to look menacingly at the camera. 

Opposite Blyth is Zegler as the female tribute from District 12 who, despite the actress being asked to do some really questionable Appalachian accent work, will take the nation by storm when she sings during the reaping. She is a clear stand-in for Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss, but her luster blinds out any memory of Lawrence in just about every aspect of the performance. After recovering from a very rough introduction, her performance levels out, and though she does not get to prove her chops as an action star as much as her predecessor, the charisma and charm she brings to screen is incredible. That she is able to foster any identifiable chemistry between her and Coriolanus is a true feat given the barriers between them. She does get lost in the narrative in the first two chapters as she spends much of it hiding for her life in the arena, but when the world opens up in the third act and the action moves from the Capital to District 12, she really gets a chance to stretch. Starting off the film as a bit of a “pick me” girl, a fault of the writers succumbing to all the pitfalls of a YA hero moreso than Zelger’s, she excels as the folk singer but she is denied the chance to meaningfully play in her own political plot involving the mayor’s daughter. Spending a little more time with her ahead of the Games would have allowed us to build a better emotional connection with the character instead of investing simply because we know that she will be important. Like almost everyone else in this film, she falls victim to poor ensemble management and an unbalanced script. 

The strongest merit of Songbirds and Snakes is how it builds its own identity. Granted, much of this falls on Collins’ who penned the novel on which the film is based, but as a prequel, it seems like it truly wants to be its own independent work even though it follows a central character of the later books. So often, prequels get bogged down by a “Skywalker Problem,” in that their effort to expand the lore and the worldbuilding is so beholden to a central character that it makes the universe feel even smaller than before because the new material is afraid to lay anything out that is not directly connected to something from the original arc. Songbirds and Snakes certainly calls forward to many characters: most directly through a young Tigris (Hunter Schafer), but also earlier generations of characters such as Hilarius Heavensbee (Florian Burgkart) and Lucky Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman), but it does not parade these characters around as esoteric references whose only purpose is to follow a predetermined track that will fit them into the later events of the franchise. By all accounts, Songbirds and Snakes is trying to be its own independent work that exists in a primitive form of an established universe, and it does a fine job at doing just that, too. As such, the first time the word “Katniss” is uttered in the film, it seems jarring and out of place, but thankfully, it does not seem particularly interested in connecting every character, item, and action to something in the original trilogy.  

With Uli Hanisch leading up the production design, the world of the film is a really interesting one. As mentioned, it is a primitive version of where the main story takes place, and it is notable that the framework of the more eccentric world is already well laid out in such a way that the progression all makes sense. The wild character names do feel a little off-centered in this more grounded – read: recent – dystopia, but the costume design from franchise-returnee Trish Summerville as well as the affectations adopted by the cast all help guide the culture of Panem to what we are more familiar with. James Newton Howard also returns to the franchise as the composer with a much larger task ahead of him than the earlier scores. He brings an elegant piano theme to the film that accents the wealth of the Capital while also finding more rustic tones to match Lucy Gray’s of-the-earth background.  Coupled with music for generic action set pieces, Howard provides the film essentially with three unique-sounding scores that all play off of each other quite well. Music fills a much bigger role here than before, and while not a musical, the film does not deny Zegler any opportunity to show off her pipes. Most incredibly, these song breaks – outside of the initial one – do not really drive the action of the scene or the momentum of the plot to a halt and are worked in quite organically.

The problem that arises, as with almost all prequels, is still the necessity of it. With Coriolanus as one of the few enduring characters, it is the only real option the story had, but it is hard to make a sympathetic backstory for who will be a major antagonist who sanctioned the deaths of 23 children each year. The actual Games are a small blip across the runtime of the film as we do not spend too much time in the arena, but when we do, the violence portrayed is quite pulpy and intimate. It is one thing to read about these deadly events on the page, but another thing entirely to see them play out on screen. Between the stratification of politics and the continued increase of violence across the nation, this franchise once again struggles with how to represent itself on screen. While the discomfort is part of the point, the film lacks the nuance to justify the visual of a scorned teen picking up a gun. Now, to be fair to the film, he is serving in an active military role at this point in the narrative, but the film seems wholly uninterested in truly engaging with the dangers of life under a military government; a philosophy which members of a certain political party have been salivating at the thought of as of late. A lot of this empty imagery is due to the ending being rushed, and while the film is thankfully not being split into multiple installments, the pointed commentary is dulled as Lawrence rushes to finish in under 3 hours.  Less time could have been spent watching the Games since none of the children who were reaped bear any emotional weight on the narrative and this time could have been better spent giving Coriolanus a smoother gradient and not glossing over the political horrors of Panem. 

Songbirds and Snakes retains much of the ambiance of the original films so while that works well for bird’s eye continuity, that means that it also feels a little dated right out of the gate because it also retains the look and feel of a late aughts/early teens YA film. Despite that, the film still works well. It is totally ancillary material and ultimately a fruitless exercise that makes its stumbled landing that much more frustrating as the engine behind it promised something a little more consequential. Zegler comes out as the clear winner not only of the Games, but of the film itself as her star shines the brightest, and though Blyth does his best with what he is given, the character seems to have been noted to death both on the page and in his representation on screen. It is a bloated mess of a film, there is no denying that, but it cannot in good conscience be called a disaster.