![]() ![]() That puts one Snow, who we know will be the future president of Panem, in the spotlight. Desperate to cling to power and to keep the Games going, the Capitol decides to do what any struggling network would do: go for an all-out ratings grab. If the Games fail, so does the Capitol’s chokehold on the Districts. The more Panem’s districts are pitted against each other, the less they see that the only way to break free from an authoritarian regime is to unite to overthrow the Capitol. Murray Close/Lionsgateīad viewership isn’t good for the people in charge because the Games are needed to stifle a rebellion. ![]() ![]() The arena in Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is dusty and pathetic. Ratings are poor because, it turns out, no one wants to watch dirty, starving, unathletic, mildly diseased children kill each other. The tributes are neither photogenic nor are they trained. The busted arena is barely bigger than a high school auditorium. The Games themselves - 24 children two from each of the nation’s 12 districts a massive fight to the death one winner - do not have any funding. Neighboring districts, who lost the war, are in even worse shape. The Capitol, which has just quashed the rebellion, is a dusty shell of its glamorous self. The main difference between Everdeen’s Hunger Games and Songbirds & Snakes’s Hunger Games is that everyone’s poor and ugly - even those in the Capitol. Doing the math and working backward, 64 years in the past brings us to the 10th annual Hunger Games, which, aside from the name, barely resembles the teenage battle royale we see Everdeen compete in. The necessity for the specific, not quite six-and-a-half-decade time jump is because Everdeen’s second foray into the games is the 75th annual iteration and features the special rule that it will be an all-winners season. Songbirds & Snakes takes place 64 years before Katniss Everdeen’s reaping and first Hunger Games victory. Songbirds & Snakes boldly asks: What if the Hunger Games was budget? This rich and fancy psychopath wasn’t always in charge of the Coachella of children-killing! Songbirds & Snakes isn’t an exoneration of the character, but rather a deep and riveting look at power, the lengths people are willing to go to achieve it, and what it all means in a world we thought we knew so well. Snow eventually becomes the sadistic mastermind who runs the Hunger Games, but he wasn’t always this way. Songbirds & Snakes flips everything we know about the Games, taking us to where it all started and Coriolanus Snow’s (Blyth) introduction to them. Yet, driven by its two charismatic leads, Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler, sharp writing, and well-executed storytelling, the prequel finds a way to be as thoughtful and agile as the best of the series. Given that it’s been so long, that the books and original movies were well-executed (to the point that the Hunger Games spurred an entire copycat YA cottage industry), and worn down by the cinematic churn of IP mining, my guard was up. Remarkably, Songbirds & Snakes has found a way to make the Hunger Gamesfeel new and sharp. Now, eight years after the original cinematic series concluded (and 13 after the release of the final novel), The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes invites us back to the brutal world of Panem, its flamboyantly named characters like Clemensia Dovecote and Palmyra Monty, and of course, all that ritualistic kid-killing. When Mockingjay: Part II, the last Hunger Games movie, was released in 2015, Barack Obama was president, Taylor Swift’s original 1989 album was the only version in existence, and Jon Snow was maybe dead on Game of Thrones. ![]()
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