Film Review - The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is based off of the 2020 prequel novel and stars Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow who we know as President Snow in the earlier stories, this story takes place 64 years before the first Hunger Games story and Coriolanus is a young man wanting a prized university scholarship and to rebuild his once proud family name but Dean Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) wants his students to make something of the Hunger Games and Snow is assigned a District 12 girl Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) and Snow wants to land on top.

I was very keen for this movie as I am a big Hunger Games fan and I really liked the book when I read it during the Dark Times in 2020 but this film version was going to have a tough task ahead of it because when I read the young Snows lines in the book I was hearing them in Donald Sutherlands voice which fundamentally would not work in any film version without it sounding ridiculous to have this old man’s voice coming out of this young mans mouth but could the film version pull it off or be yet another franchise revival that should’ve stayed dead with its picture in the sky and the sound of cannon.

Well happily this movie version pulls it off as I really really liked this movie a whole lot and first I will start with Tom Blyth who embodies the young Snow very well and more often than not when looking into his eyes you can see the lack of a soul behind them and the evil that Sutherland brought to his Snow is there waiting to bubble up to the surface with the right push, Zegler is the perfect Lucy Gray and like Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen I cannot imagine anyone else in this role, she nails the southern accent and when she sings she is captivating and her and Blyth have this dark twisted chemistry that really worked for me.

What also worked for me was the feel of this movie, it really does feel like Francis Lawrence the director of the film, James Newton Howard the score composer and the production design by Uli Hanisch pick up right where they left off from 2015’s Mockingjay Part 2, you see a lot more of the Capitol in this movie than you did in the earlier films and while its not quite that Post World War 1 Berlin vibe I got from reading the book it feels like the earlier films and the score also fits right in with the earlier films with a couple of neat callbacks that worked well for me.

And lastly the performances outside of the 2 leads are very good as well, Hunter Schafer was very good as the young Tigris even though that character is not a big one in this story, Jason Schwartzman channels Stanley Tucci well as Lucky Flickerman the first real host of the Games while Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage are a lot of fun as the sadistic leaders of the school Snow goes to.

And so that was the Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and I liked this movie a whole lot, it brought me back to Panem in a way I found very satisfying and adapted its source very well, I haven’t enjoyed a movie this much in quite a while and after the middling year we’ve had it feels like a big relief, 4 out of 5.