As a series, the Hunger Games movie tetralogy had one thing going for it that made it impossible to dismiss: The unrelenting cruelty of the whole concept of the titular games. And while I wasn’t completely convinced that the Armageddon-like climax in the fourth installment was the best way to end it, what led up to it made my argument less than airtight. So I rolled my eyes when I learned that Lions Gate was adapting Suzanne Collins’ prequel to the series, which shows how the Hunger Games showrunner, Coriolanus Snow, played by Donald Sutherland in the tetralogy, came to power as a young man. I was heartened, however, when I learned that Francis Lawrence was returning to direct it, so at least it would be consistent. 

The Hunger Games, created by the overlords of Panem to defuse the resentments of the lower class residents of the deprived districts by pitting one district against another in a winner-take-all contest to the death centered on “tribute” child warriors, have been up and running for nine years, but ratings for the broadcast, which is presented as a sporting event duded up as an emcee-run game show, have been dropping steadily. The rulers from the Capitol know they need to make it more exciting or else the natives will get restless. Thus they charge the elite students of Panem’s most prestigious prep school with mentoring individual contestants in order to goose the Games’ PR value. Snow (Tom Blyth) is one of these students and already a seething mass of ambition owing to his own family’s loss of economic station. The showrunner is Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), a sociopath of limitless cunning whose enthusiasm for seeing children kill one another seems to be the driving force in her life. Throughout this very long film, Snow and Gaul will match wits in ways that belie the YA tenets of the source material and recall something more along the lines of Orwell crossed with Jerzy Kosinski. When Snow is assigned the popular District 12 folk singer Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler), the story moves in the direction of a tragic romance, and its the development of this relationship that keeps the viewer involved because it keeps shifting as Snow’s ambitions are checked repeatedly by superiors who question his wherewithal. And that’s not to mention Gray’s own machinations, whose ends are never quite clear.

Songbirds and Snakes also has grittier action sequences. The more camera-ready forest setting of the Games in the original series, with its clever contraptions and video-game logic of gaining and losing weapons, has yet to be developed (by Snow?). Here the competition is more primal and takes place in a derelict arena where none of the tributes can hide. Every kill is direct, brutal, and final. It’s much more effective as an exercise in barbarity than anything in the original series. Even Jason Schwartzman’s emcee is cruder than his descendants in the job as he is basically a weatherman moonlighting. In fact, the cynicism on display is so overwhelming that you wonder if it could possibly qualify as YA material. If the overlords of the original series were basically civilized monsters, here they are bona fide human beings driven to blood-thirsty madness. 

Opens Dec. 22 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-668-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Lion Gate Films Inc.