The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Color Force, Good Universe, Lionsgate, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, November 28) I went to the Bears San Diego Movie Night at the AMC Mission Valley 20 to see the rather awkwardly titled The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the prequel to the fantastically successful cycle of Hunger Games stories concocted by novelist Suzanne Collins and filmed in 2012 (The Hunger Games), 2013 (the immediate sequel, Catching Fire), 2014 and 2015 (the third book in the series, Mockingjay, which as with the last books in the Harry Potter and Twilight cycles was split between two separate films). I’d been wondering what Collins was going to do for an encore but I hadn’t imagined she’d go back to the Hunger Games well and do a prequel, set 65 years before the original cycle began and dealing with the adventures of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), who in the original Hunger Games was the authoritarian president of Panem (the fictional republic representing the northeastern portion of the current United States where the Hunger Games cycle is set) and was played by Donald Sutherland. Collins was setting the filmmakers – director Francis Lawrence (who also helmed Catching Fire and both Mockingjay movies) and writers Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt – the same problem the makers of the second and third Star Wars prequels, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, had with Hayden Christensen’s character, Anakin Skywalker. Just as the people in charge of Star Wars made Anakin an heroic protagonist in those stories but with an audience already aware that in later installments he turned into the evil Darth Vader, so Lawrence, Lesslie and Arndt had to turn Coriolanus Snow into a lovable action hero while keeping in mind the despicable figure he became later in the cycle. They actually did a better job of that than Collins did – I’ve read the book and found it disappointing, but I actually liked the movie better, though maybe that was because I’d read it and therefore knew the plot in advance.

In some ways The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes becomes a story about the making of a villain in which Coriolanus Snow is torn between his good instincts, represented by his genuine affection for District 12 heroine Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zigler, who not only plays the character credibly but sings the various songs created for her – with lyrics by Suzanne Collins and effective musical settings by Dave Cobb, who also produced her recordings, and Wesley Schultz – quite well, though that shouldn’t be a surprise since she played Maria in Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story and her breakthrough came in an amateur show in which she covered “Sorrow” from the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version of A Star Is Born) and his determination to rebuild the Snow family’s power and social position in the Capital. Both Snow’s parents died in the rebellion that the Capital crushed 10 years before this story starts, and the film starts with a gruesome prologue in which Snow and his cousin Tigris – played as their younger selves by Dexter Sol Ansell and Rosa Gotzler, respectively (with Hunter Schafer as the adult Tigris) – watch a desperately poor man in the streets of the ruined Capital cut off the leg of a human corpse to eat it. Then the film cuts to the main story and the 10th annual Hunger Games, which have not yet become the big institutionalized spectacle they were 65 years later but work on the same principle. The 12 Districts from which the spoiled Capital elites extract the surplus value they need to sustain their lavish lifestyle each are obliged to send two “Tributes,” one male and one female, young people who will fight to the death in a televised spectacle in the arena in what I, in my blog post on the first Hunger Games movie, called “a combination gladiatorial duel and Most Dangerous Game-style human hunt.” As a 10th-year innovation, each Tribute is assigned a mentor from the Capital, and Coriolanus Snow is assigned Lucy Gray Baird even though, unlike Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from the made-earlier, set-later films, she’s not an urban warrior but a slight young woman whose only discernible skills are making people feel good and singing.

At the pre-game show where the Tributes are introduced, Lucy wildly impresses the audience with an old-fashioned folk ballad (though actually composed by Warren Schultz with lyrics by Suzanne Collins herself; Collins also wrote the words for the other songs Rachel Zigler sings with Dave Cobb composing the music) called “The Hanging Tree,” in which a fictional Lucy Grey gets in trouble for falling in love with a high-born lord’s son and is sentenced to death. It’s not clear from the song whether she actually dies or escapes, but the song gets all Panem to fall in love with her – and Coriolanus Show in particular gets the hots for her. When one of the Tributes kills his mentor beforehand, and later rebel terrorists bomb the arena the day before the Hunger Games and leave the place in shambles, Snow works out a plan to have Lucy hide out in the tunnels under the arena, though he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the tunnels, like the rest of the arena, have been wired with cameras so everything that goes on in there is potentially part of the show. Snow also sneaks Lucy in his mother’s old compact, which he has filled with rat poison, and keeps his mother’s handkerchief – which becomes an important plot point when the Hunger Games’ designer, genetic scientist Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis – reading the book I’d imagined her as white, but Davis turns in a full-blooded villainess performance; I wondered if she’d ever played a villain before, but it turns out she has in the film The Suicide Squad), breeds literally thousands of poisonous snakes and turns them loose in the arena at the climax of the Games. The ruling elite of the Capital have decided that there should be no winner of the Games that year, but Snow saves Lucy by sneaking his mother’s old handkerchief into the tank containing the snakes, which have been bred to avoid a Frankenstein-style catastrophe by not harming anyone whose scent is familiar to them.

Lucy is declared the winner of the Games and is sent back to District 12, but instead of the reward he was expecting – a university scholarship funded by the family of his friend Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera), who worked their way up from the Districts to become part of the Capital before the government closed down all opportunities for upward mobility – he gets drafted into the Peacekeepers, the combination police force, army and Gestapo of the Capital. He’s originally assigned to District 8 but he uses the last of his family’s money to get sent to 12 instead so he can see Lucy again, who has returned to her old gig as a traveling musician with a band called “The Covey” that plays what we now would call country-folk. (Among the songs in their repertoire is a cover of the Carter Family’s “Keep On the Sunny Side.”) Sejanus also pulls strings to join the Peacekeepers and get sent to District 12, though his real reason is to help kick off a new revolution which will be led as a front by Spruce (George Somner) and will include Lucy’s abusive ex-boyfriend Billy Taupe (Dakota Shapiro). Alas, Snow records Sejanus and Spruce plotting their rebellion on a “jabberjay,” a live bird bio-engineered by Dr. Gaul to remember any conversation held in its vicinity. In the book it was implied that this was an accident, but in the film Snow deliberately records the conversation and sends it to Dr. Gaul, thereby getting both Spruce and Sejanus hanged for treason. Snow then runs off to the north with Lucy, who has plotted this escape to get beyond Panem’s jurisdiction, but when he finds that she had stored guns in their hideout and was therefore part of the revolution, Snow guns her down in the wilderness. A flock of mockingbirds picks up her song and relays it back to Snow, freaking him out – director Lawrence and his sound designers did an effective use of directional sound here so the mockingbirds’ song really seemed to come at us from everywhere in the theatre – and at the end he’s awarded the coveted Plinth prize after all and is effectively adopted by Sejanus Plinth’s father as a surrogate son and launched on the way to an illustrious career that will end up with him becoming President of Panem in the cycle’s later entries.

What’s most interesting about The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, besides how well made it is as a movie (Francis Lawrence is an excellent director of action and suspense, but the film is a well-integrated whole and not just a series of barely connected action scenes with ponderous bits of exposition to set them up), is the Zeitgeist issues it raises. Suzanne Collins’ first Hunger Games novels and the films based on them were all products of the Obama years, in which a relatively young and vigorous President set an agenda of hope and genuinely excited younger voters. This prequel comes well into the Trump years – and though Donald Trump may have technically lost the 2020 election he still bestrides American politics like the proverbial Colossus and dominates the news, and judging from the polls it’s looking more and more like Trump will regain the Presidency in 2024 and implement a frankly authoritarian and even fascist agenda. Trump’s legacy lives on in his utter domination of the Republican Party and his ability to destroy the political careers of anyone who dares to oppose him within the GOP, and the tough-minded rhetoric of the Trump Republicans, who like their master regard cruelty as a virtue and compassion as a vice, is very much reflected in the way the Capital elites in this movie speak and their agenda to maintain their power no matter what. Even the film’s visuals evoke dictators of the past: the entrance gate to the Peacekeepers’ camp looks like the infamous one at Auschwitz with its slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (which translates either as “Work Brings Freedom” or “Work Makes You Free”), while the poster at the District 12 train station similarly evokes the official art of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

If the ultimate message of the original The Hunger Games was one of the futility of rebellion – Katniss and her lover Peeta turned their backs on society at the end and started literally cultivating their garden like Voltaire’s Candide – the message of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is even grimmer. It says that humanity is and will always be run by thugs at the top – including the fascinating character of Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, playing essentially the same sort of person he did in Game of Thrones), who makes it clear that he’s engineered the events of the film to destroy Snow and his family once and for all, and who also dreamed up the idea of the Hunger Games but becomes a guilt-ridden drug addict once he saw what it turned into in practice, and whom Snow murders at the end by spiking his drugs – and we’re naïve and stupid if we think it will ever be any other way. It says a lot about our society – most, if not all, of it negative – that a film with such a dark anti-human message would be the number one movie in the country on the eve of the year in which our real-life Coriolanus Snow, Donald Trump, is increasingly likely to return to power and become an absolute dictator. It’s even eerily appropriate that much of this movie was made at the rebuilt Babelsberg studio in Berlin, where the Nazis (the real ones) made most of their big propaganda movies!