Post by Dracula on Nov 22, 2023 20:15:50 GMT -5
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes(11/16/2023)
At every turn I kept trying to root for this movie and justify it because on some level I admire that it’s trying to be a more character focused movie made at this budget level, which is theoretically what I want from Hollywood but it just kept not really being good enough to pull it off and after a certain point I decided it had just failed in too many places to really give it that “pass” that I wanted to give it. Making mature stories with interesting characters is, unfortunately, kind of hard to pull off and you need more than good intentions to do it. You need a screenplay that flows well, which this poorly paced and weirdly structured movie does not have. You need actors that are suited to it, which in key places this doesn’t. And you also need a visionary behind the camera, which this movie also lacks. Rather than find a new director to spark this new reboot they simply got Francis Lawrence, the same guy who made the last three lackluster Hunger Games sequels. This is the same mistake that the Harry Potter movies made by just getting David Yates to come back and make all three of the Fantastic Beasts movies rather than someone who’s really capable of coming up with a new vision for a new series of movies. Make no mistake this is probably more respectable and successful than the last couple Fantastic Beasts movie but it also seems like more of a missed opportunity than they are.
**1/2 out of Five
When it first emerged in the 2010s the whole Hunger Games franchise was incredibly frustrating to me. On its surface it should have been a relief to see fairly serious minded science fiction dystopian franchise that wasn’t particularly CGI-infused making a ton of money during that decade. That first movie in particular felt like a bit of a breath of fresh air with its violent vision of a society so rife with capitalistic excess that it stages elaborate gladiatorial tournaments pitting its underclass against each other. But beneath the surface those movies suffered from the same illness that most 2010s blockbusters suffered from: and excessive deference to franchise over vision, and this felt particularly acute with the movie’s sequels, which in many ways felt less like a needed continuation of the story than like flailing attempts to continue milking a cash cow. Beyond that I just didn’t really see an auteur’s vision in them; they felt more like mercenary efforts to please the fan base of the book series they were based on than like the true vision of a filmmaker who really wants to bring the story to the screen with any real creativity. Rather than try to really make the stories work on the screen they just went ahead with some rather misshapen stories and did nothing to smooth over some of the cringier YA tropes inherent to the story. Still I always felt there was some real potential to the franchise, some good movies yearning to break free from the flawed movies we were given, and I held out some hope that the new attempt to reboot the franchise with a prequel, might be what it took to finally bring that out.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set about fifty years before the events of the first film and looks at the youth of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), the dictatorial president played by Donald Sutherland in the original films. Here Snow is the teenage scion of a once prominent family that has been in decline since the massive war that ended in a victory by the capital, the subjugation of the “districts,” and the creation of the hunger games. The Snow family did have enough clout to get Coriolanus an elite education and he now hopes to receive a monetary award called the Plinth Prize that will propel him into the upper echelons but this year this prize is contingent on a new program in which members of the capital elite will act as coaches of sorts for the “tributes” that will be competing in the 10th Annual Hunger Games. Snow is assigned to a female tribute from the 12th District named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), and generally takes this assignment more seriously than many of his colleagues and turns Baird into a popular figure through her various folk song performances and general attitudes. What happens when the games begin may well reset the course of Snow’s life and given where we know he ends up, by extension it will therefore affect the whole of Panem.
With this prequel we once again have a Hunger Games story that certainly feels like it had potential. There is something potentially subversive about using a big budget franchise prequel to tell the story of a future villain’s indoctrination into an unjust system. To the movie’s credit it does indeed stick to that and gives us what is essentially a character study about a (by YA standards) somewhat nuanced character. The film is also pretty effective at its world building elements: its vision of an earlier era of Panem feels believably less advanced than what we saw in the earlier films including a version of the hunger games themselves which are shorter and more contained and fought out in something more akin to a colosseum than a forested virtual reality space. Speaking of those hunger games, they take up much of the second act of the film and are done in a pretty exciting fashion which is something of a highlight within the movie. That’s a double edged sword though as the games feel like something of a climax to the movie in a lot of ways only to have the film go on for almost another hour once they’re done. That third act, is… well on some levels I admire what it’s trying to do as it’s trying to end the movie on some rather ambiguous character beats instead of an action sequence but the whole thing is kind of woozy and the film’s characters and writing just aren’t strong enough to support it.
Tom Blyth is serviceable enough as a young Coriolanus Snow and the film does a good enough job walking the tightrope of making him, in his “pre-fall” mode, a likable enough character while still showing the flaws and ambition that will consume him. Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray Baird on the other hand… man, she’s plainly positioned to be this movie’s Katniss Everdeen and the comparison is not flattering. I really want to like Rachel Zegler, who showed great promise in West Side Story but she seems to be really miscast here. Zegler is many things but she is not “folksy” which is what seems to be the defining feature of this character, who is otherwise something of an underwritten enigma. Also, presumably because of Zegler’s work in Spielberg’s musical remake they decided to keep giving this characters these folk/country ballads to sing at various points and turn that into a defining characteristic and it really just doesn’t work, in part because these songs aren’t as great as the filmmakers seem to think they are and in part because, again, Rachel Zegler is not believably “folksy.” I also must question just how effective the hunger games themselves are supposed to be as pretty much every one of them that we’ve seen seems to be defined by defiant female folk heroes using them as a platform for civil disobedience, which I’m pretty sure isn’t supposed to be their purpose.
**1/2 out of Five
