With dizzying visuals, stunning cinematography, and complex, brooding characters, the questions of existence and consumerism of “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” render it — for lack of a better word — a great movie.
For non-Hunger-Games fans, the movie might start off slow. One might get lost in the film’s various dystopian terminologies and technicalities.
As the film progresses, however, director Francis Lawrence hooks audiences with Panem’s dark skies and the Capitol’s even darker moral compasses.
“Will this be our world sometime soon?” With a sense of creeping dread, this is the thought that comes to mind.
A sequel to “The Hunger Games,” this film focuses on the backstory of the tyrannical President Snow (Tom Blythe).
In “The Hunger Games,” President Snow is notorious for his attempts to ruin numerous tributes’ lives and further perpetuate the cycle of the Games. “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” attempts to clarify his actions, providing some, if any, raison d’être.
The result? A thirst for power.
The film commences with a bird’s-eye view of a seemingly barren wasteland, littered with corpses, leading to two children crouching behind a tower. They say to each other, in hushed voices, “Why is he doing this?”
One of those children was Coriolanus Snow. From the moment audiences watch him earnestly get dressed for his first day preparing for the annual Hunger Games at the Capitol to the film’s last shot of him surveying the land he is now president of, President Snow has always been selfish — sacrificing everyone he’s close to, everything, to be successful.
That thirst for power is what defines the movie and keeps audiences entertained.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” follows the evolution of a once-naïve young boy: from looking up to the skies with the hope and aspiration that one day he’ll be known; to being a ruthless politician armed with the knowledge that whatever the circumstances, he will prevail.
The film wraps this character arc in shots distinguishing between the idyllic life of civilians in the Districts and the gruesome, violent Hunger Games.
At once, the probability of our world today evolving to one not unlike Panem seems both far-fetched and all too possible, a thought that will remain with audiences long after this movie.