The Best "Hunger Games" Movie

I've consistently liked the "Hunger Games" movies, and consider them the best of that wave of YA genre films that started with "Twilight."  The latest entry is an oddball for several reasons - YA genre films are a rarity now, and this is also a prequel, subtitled "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes."  The main character is Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), one of the main villains of the series, but at a point in time when he was a young man with the potential to be a force for good.  The Hunger Games themselves are also new-ish, having been around for only ten years.  The game maker Dr. Gaul (Viola Davis) is looking to make changes to the Games to increase their ratings, including assigning the participants mentors from the Capitol.  Snow is one of these mentors and ends up with a mentee from District 12, a singer and entertainer named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler).

"Songbirds and Snakes" is the best "Hunger Games" movie by a pretty wide margin.  It's got a smaller budget and isn't the greatest when it comes to action or spectacle, but the main concepts and worldbuilding are absolutely fascinating.  It was a great choice to mirror the development of Snow as a villain with the start of the Hunger Games' transformation into the huge, malevolent propaganda production they would become decades later.  I appreciate that Snow is someone who actively makes the choice to go bad, and has both good and bad mentors and friends.  There's a refreshing complexity to a lot of the characters here.  The Capitol is a cutthroat environment, still recovering from a terrible war, and most of the youngsters who act badly do so out of self-preservation.  By contrast, Coriolanus's compassionate, anti-Hunger Games friend Sejanus (Jose Andres Rivera) turns out to be extremely naive about how the world works.  Peter Dinklage also briefly appears as Highbottom, the self-hating creator of the Hunger Games and the head of the Academy where Snow is a student.  

Like in the previous films, the dialogue sometimes takes the melodrama to silly extremes.  The writers can't resist the urge to drop in eye-rolling references and on-the-nose pronouncements that the excellent cast gamely deliver with  straight faces.  Then there are Lucy Gray Baird's songs, which are numerous enough that this film might qualify as the first "Hunger Games" musical.  Zegler is very talented and mostly gets away with it.  However, these movies are supposed to be larger-than-life, and there's a good amount of dark humor and satire in the mix to keep things lively.  Jason Schwartzman plays the first Hunger Games host with smarmy panache, and Viola Davis seems to enjoy being the sinister Machiavellian figure and mad scientist.  This version of the Games is so rudimentary that it sometimes borders on farce, with crashing delivery drones and a passel of unwashed participants who are literally dumped out of a truck at one point. 

As usual, the combat of the Games is a high point of the film, taking up the entire second act.  Crucially, however, it's not the climax of the story.  The third act goes in an entirely different direction, narrowing in scope to focus on Coriolanus and Lucy in a new context and bring Coriolanus to an eventual epiphany.  It's one of the only times in the series where the conflict is driven by internal instead of external forces, and it's very effective.  I honestly forgot that I was watching a franchise action film in a few sequences.  And I was especially grateful for Blyth and Zegler here, who handily outdo all of the prior "Hunger Games" protagonists in the romance department.  

Prequels and origin stories are generally tough, because they often feel so unnecessary.  In "Songbirds and Snakes," however, it feels like the franchise is trying to grapple with some of the fundamental questions of its premise in a way that it didn't get around to in the earlier movies.  Coriolanus is asked multiple times to explain what the Hunger Games are for, and he and the movie deliver some satisfying responses.  So I wouldn't mind a few more visits back to this universe if Susan Collins, Francis Lawrence, and their collaborators have more stories to tell.             

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