The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Is Important
The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Is Phenomenal
The Hunger Games trilogy is important to me. I read the series right before the craze hit. To this day, it may be the first fandom I was on the ground floor for. I recall seeing every movie quickly after they came out. It and Animorphs have no doubt shaped my opinions of war and mercy and violence and helped me, as a young reader, understand moral complexity far more than any conversation ever could. I didn’t yet understand the full scope of the political satire back then, but I understood the feelings it evoked, especially the gut-sickening ones at how dehumanized The Capitol rendered children. I understood that I was reading about different forms of evil. I have since grown, understand much more of what the series is saying, and now consider The Hunger Games trilogy to be not only one of the best works of dystopian fiction ever written, but one of the most important. If I were to have control of an English class curriculum, I’d have it mandated reading like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye. This is not to say that older dystopian literature isn’t as important. Fahrenheit 451 is an incredible piece, worth reading especially in our modern age, but for the next hundred years, if not longer, The Hunger Games will be what teaches generations of readers to recognize government-sponsored cruelty, and how the abhorrent can become accepted through enough forceful propaganda.
The Hunger Games Books Are Incredibly Relevant
This is all to say that my review of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is spoken from a level of deep respect, personal politics, and nostalgia that will affect my conclusions. I’ve yet to read the book, and I’ll admit that’s a ding against my review, but it is not just a movie to me. I am perceiving the tale as a vehicle for satire and commentary; I am perceiving it as a condemnation of cruelty and a hope-spark of human kindness. It’s a prequel to media that changed my life. And I do think The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is intended to be experienced in that way and was created with an understanding of how many fans are now grown and will watch it. The best, most effecting moments are often single lines of dialog, or single shots, expertly put forth with the full weight of their meaning but respectfully not spelled out. Its characters are complex because what they represent is complex, and amazing words mean more when they come from the mouths of strong characters.
The Amount Of Subtext In This Movie Is Incredible
Let’s begin with the world, narrow our focus to those characters, then widen it back out. Perhaps the most effective thing about The Hunger Games trilogy from a moment-to-moment perspective, and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes has this in spades, is the specificity of the worldbuilding and its situations. A lot of dystopian fiction is set in worlds that don’t feel real. The technology, the socio-economics, and the esthetics aren’t believable. But I believe that Panem could exist. Panem is a fascist-run country where people are arbitrarily separated into Districts, kept there by poverty, and seemingly constantly being threatened with lethal punishment because a rebellion or even just large-scale riots are so likely to happen every day that a constant haze of brutality (self-sacrifice is discouraged by making threats usually ripple to family or friends) is the only thing keeping the population from trying (harder) for a better world. It’s a flimsy façade of power, propped up by spectacle and violence.
The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Has Its Realism
Which is what makes Coriolanus Snow an amazing protagonist to put in this story, the story of how The Hunger Games became a TV show special, and not just a bloodbath. He mirrors the Capitol in so many ways—but it takes a while for his pure spite and rage to become visible. At the beginning, well within the whims of commercial storytelling, we are invited to emphasis with him like any protagonist in a YA story. He’s made sympathetic through his family and his suffering, and likeable through signifiers and small acts. It’s almost aggressively done. Orphaned. Talented. Starving. He gives someone else the food out of seeming kindness. But the other side of him is mixed in expertly. He’s managed to get into The Capitol’s grace through connections and reputation. Behind the calm, he’s hungry. Hungry for glory, power, and literal food. This prize is dangled in front of him like so many other protagonists wanting an escape from a bad situation. But the inciting incident—the change to the prize—makes this a Hunger Games story. The prize is no longer determined by academic efforts; it’s determined by who can make the coming slaughter get the most views. He becomes more a part of the violence because Panem is built on reducing people to violence with both dangling carrots and swift, sharp sticks.
Coriolanus Snow Is A Haunting Villain Protagonist
Enter Lucy Gray. The layers of thought put into this character are actually beyond my analysis at this point. She’s obviously a quirky girl character—evoking the “manic pixie dream girl” trope right away—including how her connections to Snow seem to change his life for the better. But this isn’t so shallow a tale. The movie is sharply, deftly, making a point. She’s commodified by society and by Snow. The games become more popular by her being forced into being, well, a Songbird. But she’s a person, and the story makes sure to assert that with full energy. She’s from a (seemingly dying) culture that’s being forced into the District system, echoing real-world tragedies so closely it’s impossible to ignore the parallels. She’s a performer of beautiful songs forced to perform as a killer or a tragedy, but finds her way back—again and again—to songs. Her songs are rebellious; she’s brave to even sing them in the presence of The Capitol’s occupying force, and they echo into the other movies as a call for justice. I feel like crying when I think about art’s history during wars and times of cruelty, and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes captures that idea beautifully. Dissertations should (or perhaps already have been) written on Lucy’s cultural connections, historical reference points, and how she also highlights how Coriolanus Snow was never motivated by actual love, but a twisted, self-serving thing, and she was unlucky enough to end up his meal ticket. She asks if it is for himself or for her that he helps make her popular in the games. His answer is both, and his answer was always a lie. Always. As Lucy says, she’s not made of sugar—she’s a survivor, not an object of desire, not reduced to a trope—but Snow thought of her as his sweet reward for doing what seemed to please her and, like everyone else in his life, someone so easily dispatched when they no longer please him.
Lucy Gray Is An Excellent And Complex Character
Despite my many words on the two standouts, this movie isn’t actually structured like a character study, though. Any Hunger Games movie should, for marketing purposes, have a game that’s played—let’s not get into the irony of that—and so of course The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes has one. But it’s interesting where it fits into the film, and it’s interesting these insights we get into the games before they become what we know them as. You get the impression, even from a few passing comments and the general layout, that Hunger Games used to last maybe a half-hour, and really were just a bloodbath. Despite there being “Gamemakers” who presumably worked on and planned out the slaughter, the arena is sparse. It doesn’t have food or water. We see no survival gear in the Cornucopia, only a random assortment of weapons. The rebel bombings (we must assume those really were rebel bombings—the movie doesn’t say they’re fake) are the only reason the arena even has cover, multiple rooms, or any usable elevation. I question the internal logic of using unrelated death-traps throughout this series (it’s commented on how the Games are not random executions) but we get the impression that this is the first time they’ve been added for additional drama. Curiously, what we see of the Capitol in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is also paired back, less ostentatious, and more modeled after a modern city. This could be to show that the Capitol hasn’t rebuilt enough, hasn’t amassed enough wealth, but I like to also see it as a sign of how wealth-disparity excess rose in tandem with the increasing opulence and pageantry of the games themselves. Just as discussed in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes dialog, President Coriolanus Snow sees the whole world as the games, and he’s its ultimate victor.
Multiple Strong Themes Get In-Depth Explorations
Now I said that I would be biased, and clearly, I meant that. This review is glowing, and I didn’t even have time to fully praise the wonderful acting, set design, and how effective the movie uses callbacks. It is astonishing how effective the extended snow metaphors are, and worth studying how the movie keeps reusing objects and ideas in new, interesting (and sometimes hauntingly brutal) ways. But I do have one big complaint, and I couldn’t shake it the whole time I was viewing this movie. And it’s this: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is paced terribly. It should’ve been two movies. I have a feeling it’s a result of people not liking how Mockingjay was split up into two, but The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is really a pair of separate, connected stories that play out one after the other, and despite a staggering length of 2.5 hours or so, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes cannot get through all it must without jumping from scene to scene, not letting pivotal moments linger or breath. The original The Hunger Games takes a long time for the games to get going. The concept has tension. Here it feels like Snow just reinvents the games on the fly with his singular note, resulting in an off-screen interview with a huge cast of Tributes (it’s a marvel we know some of their personalities), and then, bang it’s into the games we go. And from there, the timeline jumps along, giving us only the biggest events and the most important conversations. The movie becomes a summary of itself; its presumed story outline laid bare. It only occasionally slows its speedy pace to deliver a narratively incredible line. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes might actually be more fun to think/talk about (or, in my case, write about) than the actual viewing experience. And while I do consider this an important piece of media that people should see, it is ultimately not a nonfiction piece, and viewers going in who’ve (for whatever reason) waited this long to see another Hunger Games movie might be disappointed that it’s not always the most engaging piece of cinema. You should have people over at your house to see it, if possible. You should analyze it like you’re in a film class. It deserves that, and it will make the process more fun. As for me, I watched it alone, and for hours after I finished my viewing, I felt the echoes of the last pages of my bright blue, hardcover copy of Mockingjay as I snapped it shut after that final page.
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