Whitney Nervilus

The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is an outstanding, strong, and emotional movie that brings you back to the heart-jerking world of Panem. I experienced the brilliance of everything Hunger Games for the first time in seventh grade when we read the series in my English class. They were unlike any other books I’ve ever read. Suzanne Collins' ability to take us from our mundane lives and plunge us into a world of imagination and suspense is something truly incredible and quite rare. The movies do that even more so. Putting faces on the characters we’d long been imagining and telling their stories in 4k. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes follows the young life of Panem’s president Coriolanus Snow and details his slow but sure descent into insanity as the 10th annual Hunger Games ensues and he meets Lucy Gray; the girl who sings. The impact of this movie was mainly due to the amazing casting decisions made. Tom Blythe as Snow was great. He took the character and made it his own, adding a cheeky, charismatic charm to the cold, evil Snow we knew from the films before. He’s able to illustrate the insecure, sadistic inner thoughts of Snow without any words. Rachel Zegler’s performance as Lucy Gray really tied the whole thing together. Her acting as well as her jaw dropping singing voice really made the movie a “ballad” as the title states. The cinematography was also stunning with bold choices in color and scene variation. The cinematographers build the dystopian atmosphere by using a lot of cold color to highlight the destitute feel of the districts and the empty feel of the capital. Although the pacing was a bit quick and the movie a whopping two hours and thirty seven minutes, it still managed to make it seem as if we never left the world of Panem. Overall, this movie dives into the oppressive system of the capital and how it shaped Coreolanus Snow into the cold, calculating, and manipulative man that he is later in the story. It also acknowledges how morally wrong killing children for entertainment is and themes like race and class that are directly linked to that topic. I personally believe that this is the second best movie in the Hunger Games series after Catching Fire. It adds so much to the original story and plays on the philosophical concept of hunt or be hunted.