The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)

Quippy title: 🎶🐍 “Snow’s First Song is Off-Key”

Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

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Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

This prequel decides to tell the “origin story” of President Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) — the future tyrant of Panem. The idea: show us how he went from a poor but ambitious teenager to the cold dictator we all know. The problem? For about two hours, the film paints him as a decent, even sympathetic guy who falls in love with a tribute, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). Then, in the final half hour, the movie does a whiplash heel-turn into “surprise, he was evil all along!”

On paper, that’s fine. In execution? It feels like two completely different scripts duct-taped together. It doesn’t help that the book apparently portrayed young Snow as manipulative from the start — but the film goes for “gentle-hearted protagonist” until it suddenly remembers he’s supposed to be a villain.

Question do u buy these 2 as the same person?

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Character Rundown

Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) – The wannabe noble, “good-hearted” mentor for most of the movie. Then, in the last act, suddenly ruthless. The inconsistency kills the character.

Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) – The musical tribute he mentors. Full of charm, charisma, and songs… though her relationship with Snow feels less like chemistry and more like YA fanfiction.

Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) – Mad scientist of the Capitol. She loves experimenting with new tortures (snakes, poisons, you name it). Davis goes all in, and she’s easily the creepiest part of the film.

Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) – Supposedly the “creator” of the Games. Broody, bitter, and drinks a lot. Great actor, wasted in the story.

Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera) – Snow’s friend, rich kid with morals. Spoiler: being moral in this world gets you killed.

The Games Commentator (Jason Schwartzman) – The proto-Stanley Tucci. Brings some dark humor, but he’s more like a parody than a personality.



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Pacing / Episode Flow

This film is a monster at 2 hours and 37 minutes, and boy, you feel it. The first two hours are just Snow trying to mentor Lucy and invent new gimmicks for the Hunger Games (audience voting, parachute supplies, etc.). The final 30 minutes suddenly swerve into betrayal, paranoia, and him becoming “evil.” It’s like watching two separate movies stitched together.


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Pros

The early, stripped-down Hunger Games. Tributes thrown in a zoo pen, starved, dirty, and treated like animals. That’s haunting and genuinely disturbing.

Viola Davis. Every scene she’s in, she’s terrifying and unhinged.

The snakes. Creepy, effective, and foreshadow how cruel the Capitol’s games will become.

Tone. At times, it’s dark enough to push PG-13 to its limit, which at least makes it memorable.



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Cons

Snow’s arc. The movie spends two hours convincing us he’s a good guy, then 20 minutes saying “jk, he’s evil.” It’s sloppy and unearned.

Lucy Gray romance. Feels more like YA melodrama than a believable relationship.

Mean-spirited touches. A disabled tribute, a throat-slitting scene with a mentor — it’s edgy but not thoughtful.

Too long, too muddled. At nearly three hours, it still feels rushed and confused about what story it wants to tell.

Tone-deaf ending. Snow becoming evil because “his girlfriend left him” feels like a CW drama, not a dystopian epic.



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Final Thoughts

This film is technically competent, well-acted in places, and interesting in its darker moments. But as an origin story? It fumbles hard. If you’ve read the book, you’ll be frustrated at how it dilutes Snow’s manipulative nature. If you haven’t, you’ll spend two hours thinking, “Wait, isn’t this guy supposed to be the villain?” before the movie finally remembers.

It’s not the worst Hunger Games film (Mockingjay Part 1 still holds that title for me), but it’s also completely pointless. We didn’t need a movie to tell us Snow is bad. We knew.


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Rating

6/10


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🚨 Spoiler Warning 🚨

Spoilers

Snow is assigned to mentor Lucy Gray, a tribute from District 12 who can sing her way into people’s hearts. He tries to help her survive, even cheating by sneaking her items (and tampering with Gaul’s vat of snakes so they’ll ignore her). She wins, thanks to his interference.

But the Capitol finds out he cheated, so they send him to serve as a soldier. There, he conveniently bumps into Lucy again, who’s performing at a soldiers’ pub. Meanwhile, his “friend” Sejanus is illegally trading weapons. Snow rats him out, sentencing his own buddy to execution by hanging. Lucy writes “The Hanging Tree” song from this, tying it back to Katniss’s later rebellion anthem.

Snow and Lucy then run off into the woods to start a life together… except Lucy realizes Snow’s got a darker side. She disappears. Snow, paranoid, storms the forest with a machine gun screaming her name. When she’s gone for good, he shrugs, goes back to the Capitol, and becomes evil overnight.

He poisons Casca Highbottom with venom, fully embraces his ambition, and ends the film looking slick in his crimson jacket — Snow, the tyrant we “know.”

The problem? The transition is laughably rushed. Two hours of “gentle Snow” followed by 20 minutes of “incel dictator origin story.” It plays like bad fanfiction, and it undermines what could’ve been a sharp political tragedy.


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👉 Bottom line: this prequel tries to humanize Snow but ends up neutering him, only to force an evil turn at the last second. It’s too long, too inconsistent, and feels like a story nobody really needed.