Let me just start by using this opportunity to talk about my deep love for the Hunger Games as a whole. Like most twelve-year-olds at the time, I was obsessed with Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books when they first came out, and just as much a fan of the movies when they rolled around. Even today, the movies covering the first trilogy are some of my favourite comfort films. The originals are filled with my own childhood nostalgia along with clever filmmaking and incredible acting talent. Most importantly, they take themselves incredibly seriously, and push past the genre to expand their message. The stakes are very real, tangible, and deeply upsetting. Especially in the second and final film, prominent themes like the worth of a human life are on constant display. Even characters that may be considered ‘comedic relief’, like Effie Trinket, are written and performed as real people with hopes and fears.
So when they announced the new movie, The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, my first thought, to be candid, was ‘I had no idea Collins had written another book.’ I decided it’s probably because I’m not on adolescent-girl-Twitter, a fact that I actually found highly comforting. Regardless, I decided I wouldn’t read the book, in part because I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit that much time to both reading the entire novel and watching what I already expected to be a long movie, but also because I was excited to see what it was like watching a Hunger Games movie knowing absolutely nothing. Turns out, wrong move. I was underwhelmed as the story opened, realising that going back in time within the Hunger Games world didn’t scratch the itch I hoped it would. In fact, what I found intriguing about the original story is that the history and political nuances were lost on the protagonist, and so equally the audience found these issues mystifying. The mystery behind how a post-apocalyptic United States would turn into Panem was far more satisfying than the real thing. Though the movie remains reluctant to explain exactly what happened, the world we open into is far to similar to our own, and strikingly unlike the Panem we have come to know. As a middling point in this fictional history, it poses too many questions to answer in its short runtime, and it’s attempts to do so are half-baked.
In fact, this seemed to be a major issue running throughout the film. A dense sequence of events from start to finish requires the film to sprint from moment to moment, and never sit in it’s more intense moments of internal turmoil.
After the movie, I’ve seen increasing posts online highlighting that the primary dissimilarity between the book and the movie is the focus on the development of the protagonist’s complicated conscience. Instead, the movie chooses action sequences and big set pieces over this exploration of Snow’s sinister and self-obsessed personality. This is yet another deviation from the first films, which more inward-facing, and used clever story-telling mechanics to unveil Katniss’s thoughts, like her struggle with what appears to be PTSD at the beginning of the second movie. In this addition to the franchise, I left the film feeling unattached to Tom Blyth’s and Rachel Zegler’s characters, and while I feel their struggle was down to writing and direction, I still wanted more from these two otherwise promising actors.
In total the movie was a perfectly watchable blockbuster, but, and this may be overly reflective of my personal bias, at its core failed to understand what was so endearing about the originals and doesn’t quite meet expectations.
Reel Talk 