‘Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’: Movie review

By: Abisola Dosunmu

‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’, is a prequel to the four-part ‘Hunger Games’ movie franchise that’s set “64 years before Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen ever drew breath”, which means there are several serious changes. The known antagonist, Coriolanus Snow, who was played by Donald Sutherland in the previous movie, is now an 18-year-old kid played by actor Tom Blyth. Actress Rachel Zegler replaces Jennifer Lawrence as the female protagonist and plays one of the vital main characters, Lucy Gray Baird.

The movie was authored by Suzanne Collins and, like the ‘Hunger Games’, centers on a fight to the death/survival-of-the-fittest type reality show that only leaves one victor. For context, the games were invented as a punishment by the Capitol of Panem as payback to the 12 districts who dared to rebel against the Capitol. Every year on a specific day since that, a boy and a girl, relatively in their teens, are chosen from each district to fight to the death in a televised gladiator event.

Lucy as a character is already shown throughout the movie to be a different character to Katniss. She, like the title of the movie, is a songbird with a guitar and in a traveling band called the Covey. Strangely enough, the movie isn’t told from her point of view but from the younger Snow struggling to make it back to the top after losing everything. Lucy is his way back to that life, so he takes advantage of it and with that, the Hunger Games begin. Without giving away spoilers, I’m just going to say it gets pretty predictable from there.

So, what did I think of the movie? Well, it’s been a long time since I watched and read the ‘Hunger Games’, so basing it off of that it’s a refreshing and new take. It was interesting seeing young Snow and his motivations and aspirations and how the Capitol was the same but different a few decades ago. The actors had a lot of chemistry and the only bad thing I would say about the movie was that there wasn’t a lot of screen time for a lot of characters to develop the way there was in the book, so some characters felt rushed and not properly fleshed out. All in all, I’d give this movie an 8/10.

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