Terminally dull prequel, full of backstory you won’t care about at all
Director: Francis Lawrence
Cast: Tom Blyth (Coriolanus Snow), Rachel Zegler (Lucy Gray Baird), Josh Andrés Rivera (Sejanus Plinth), Viola Davis (Dr Volumnia Gaul), Peter Dinklage (Casca Highbottom), Jason Schwatzman (“Lucky” Flickerman), Hunter Schafer (Tigris Snow), Fionnula Flanagan (Grandma’am), Burn Gorman (Commander Hoff), Ashley Liao (Clemensia Dovecote)
Did you watch Hunger Games and wonder – ‘this is great and all but where did that guy Coriolanus Snow come from, eh’? Not sure I did. And I’m not sure I really needed to know, now that I’ve sat through all interminable 158 minutes of Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes or Hitler: The Early Days. Imagine, if you will, the original Hunger Games movie – but if it was much longer, had an utterly uninteresting lead character and took itself so seriously you’d think it was offering a solution to third world debt and climate change all at once. Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes worst crime isn’t that it goes on forever, that it retreads old ground with no new ideas or that it feels like a pointlessly over-extended footnote. It’s that it is overwhelmingly, crushingly, dull.
People didn’t care about the back story: they cared about Katniss Everdean, a perfectly crafted character, hugely engaging and relatable on every viewing. I cared about her struggle to protect the people she loved not the backdrop of Panem politics. Did anyone? If I was interested in anything in Panem politics it was the way the Games both terrified the huddle masses of the districts and gave them hope. Unfortunately, this film either didn’t understand that, didn’t care or assumed we’d happily invest in the original’s villain if he was buff and had a dreamy girlfriend.
Young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, doing his best to sound like Donald Sutherland) is one of the leading students in Panem, selected to mentor a tribute through the 10th Hunger Games. Young Snow’s loins heat-up when his tribute is manic pixie dream-girl Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler) from District Twelve. But what excites him more: a tumble with a girl from the sticks, or persuading outlandishly loopy games master Dr Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, the only person having fun) he knows how to turn this gladiatorial deathmatch into ratings gold? You got one guess what he picks.
Though it takes him a very, very, very long time to pick it. We watch this Proto-Hitler embrace his inner sociopath, through a weary trudge in Hunger Games lore with the origins of virtually every prop in the original movies lovingly laid out for us. Ever wondered why Snow wears that buttonhole? This is the film for you and then some. Almost every single thing in Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is linked to something in the original movies. It’s the sort of unimaginative, world-shrinking yawn-fest where nearly every character shares a surname of a character from the original films – but of course Caesar Flickerman’s dad has exactly the same job, personae and style as he does!
You could let this go if Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had an interesting story of its own. But it’s tedious, self-important plot makes Attack of the Clones look like Tolstoy. It chucks in a little bit of arena slaughter, but inexplicably makes it unclear how many of Coriolanus’ suggestions for improving the show are actually changing things. When the tributes perform for ‘favour’ is that something they always did (as most people behave like it is) or because Coriolanus scrawled memo suggested it (as the film implies)? The wider impact is also lost: are people bonding with Lucy Gray or having their child-killing-urges ticked in brand new ways by Coriolanus? Who knows.
It doesn’t help that Ballad seems shy about making Coriolanus himself a villain. It gives Tom Blyth a difficult act to pull off and he’s left playing his cards so close to his (inevitably) buff – his future sadism doesn’t stand in the way of a good topless scene in this film – chest that rather than wondering what will top him into sociopathy, he instead becomes a flat, boring character, with even his lust for Lucy fizzling rather than sizzling.
Rachel Zegler gets a bit more fun as this irritating mix of idealist and realist (she is pretty much whatever the plot needs from scene-to-scene – one minute angrily slapping away offerings of food, the next cowering in shocked fear when danger comes calling), with Ballad at least a good vehicle for Zegler’s vocal talents. But Lucy Gray remains too enigmatic – and, to be honest, just as dull in her unknowability – to ever become someone you care about. And never, for one minute, in her flower-crafted dress and perfect make-up do you believe she is a child of the ghetto in the way you did with Jennifer Lawrence.
Honestly the film misses a hero as complex and multi-layered as Katniss and splitting facets of her into two other characters just creates to incomplete characters. Throw in a plot that lacks any energy – it’s lackadaisical second half, with Coriolanus chucked into the wilderness as a Stormtrooper in District 12, goes on forever – and which gets bogged down in an utterly unengaging and confusing rebellion plotline with is resolved with a nonsensical narrative flourish – and it’s a recipe for disaster. It never, ever get the pulse racing as it stumbles, yawningly, to its end.
The stuff that actually is interesting gets shunted to the sidelines. A bored Peter Dinklage gets a late monologue on the creation of the Hunger Games that you desperately want to hear more about it, but don’t. Viola Davis, barrelling over-the-top under a mountain of demented hair, weird contact lenses and bizarre costumes, keeps talking about ‘the purpose of the Hunger Games’ in a portentous way that sounds like its leading somewhere but never does (so much so, I wondered if the filmmakers even understood the bread-and-circuses-as-control metaphor going on here).
Francis Lawrence directs as if this background-filling pamphlet from Suzanne Collins was a newly discovered Testament. The film is slow, stately and gives even the smallest, most inconsequential moments an unbearable level of self-important significance. It lacks pace and interest – so much so that even the slaughter of eleven scruffy, malnourished children and teenagers feels tired and ‘seen it all before’. There is no mystery, no sense of roads-not-taken, not even any peril . Just small elements of a more interesting later story being slotted dutifully in place, you realise you never wondered where Coriolanus Snow came from because it never mattered in the first place.
Movie Musings 