An Epic Return to Panem for the 10th Hunger Games
DIRECTOR: FRANCIS LAWRENCE
My first thought when I saw this movie’s runtime: Yeesh.
At 2 hours and 37 minutes, it’s 10 minutes longer than any of Katniss Everdeen’s battles in the original Hunger Games series, and since this prequel is set 60 years before then, we’re only loosely tethered to those stakes and characters. In the decade since Jennifer Lawrence first picked up a bow, have we been clamoring for more Panem? And have we been clamoring for it in three-hour increments? I picked up the 500-plus-page novel with even lower expectations than these in 2020, but what else did I have to do that year?
Those low hopes stem in part from an entertainment industry so dependent on known intellectual property I immediately assume such a book and a movie can only be lazy cash grabs. You could certainly say of Fast X and The Flash, neither of which find anything meaningful in their 2 hours and 20 minutes. That pessimism may also be rooted in my well–documented appreciation for movies less than 100 minutes, but even so, I had a blast at Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, which both clock in close to 3 hours. I buckled up for 3-hour epics Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon (plus the additional 26 minutes in Scorsese’s case), and I’m not surprised by the runtimes of arthouse films and award hopefuls like Anatomy of a Fall (2:31), Beau is Afraid (2:59), and Napoleon (2:38). I’ve begrudgingly accepted length as an unpleasant side effect of superhero movies like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2:20) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2:30), as well as superhero-adjacent franchises like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2:34) and John Wick: Chapter 4 (2:49). So why did I enter the theater a skeptic for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, especially when I couldn’t put Collins’s novel down? I finally had to face something I wasn’t proud to admit: Did I have low expectations for this movie because it’s about…teens?
To be fair, the 2010s did deliver its fare share of no–if–and–or–buts subpar dystopian teen adventures, but The Hunger Games series delivered four of the best of them, introducing Jennifer Lawrence to the world and Woody Harrelson to a new generation. Songbirds & Snakes may have an Urban Outfitters tie-in collection, but reducing either the book or movie to the insult of “cash grab” is an insult to its audience. When I discovered The Hunger Games series, I was 19 and became obsessed in short order, not just because it was popular but because it spoke about mental health, sensationalized media, and gray morality. (Okay, and that love triangle—#TeamPeeta!) How could I forget in just a few years how much author Suzanne Collins and director Francis Lawrence have found to say through the world of Panem?
Katniss takes down the Capitol shortly after the 75th Hunger Games, but you’d hardly recognize her experience watching the first decade of the Games. Just days from the 10th annual fete of ritualized child murder, Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) is graduating high school with no inkling he will one day be president of this dystopia. As a Capitol resident, he’s not a candidate to compete in the arena, but his family’s good name is the only thing hiding their poverty. His best chance for a future is winning the prestigious (and profitable) Plinth Prize, but he must compete with his classmates to save The Hunger Games from dwindling ratings. He is assigned to mentor a District 12 tribute with even more moxie than Katniss, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), and he soon realizes her talents as a singer-songwriter could capture the attention of wealthy viewers who might sponsor her fight to the death. He begins making suggestions to the self-medicated Games creator (Peter Dinklage) and the sadistic Head Gamemaker (Viola Davis) about how to give the event dominance akin to ‘00s American Idol, but the more media attention the Games drive—largely thanks to Jason Schwartzman’s magician-turned-host Lucky Flickerman—the murkier Coriolanus’s motives become. If he wins the Games, could he save his family, the girl who may be stealing his heart, and his future? Or will he be forced to make a choice that costs either his life or his soul?
Good luck finding 10% of that complexity in the premise for either Fast X or The Flash, which only benefit from 20 fewer minutes since their plots can be summed up as “man go fast.” The fifth Hunger Games is arguably the best at critiquing the media circus that exploits violence, children, talent, and poverty, and stripping away the seven decades of tradition built up by Katniss’s time reminds us a culture’s sins don’t happen by accident. Because we know our protagonist is a future villain (one Donald Sutherland will play glee, no less) and because we know the Games will survive along with him, this chapter isn’t inspiring us with a David-and-Goliath revolution but writing King Herod’s origin story before his genocide in Bethlehem.
As in the original four films, Songbirds & Snakes walks the delicate line of finding frisson without manipulating its viewers into forgetting the plot’s discomfort. The costumes and production design are as beautifully Byzantine as ever, taking inspiration from ancient Roman gladiators, 1930s Great Depression technology, and 1970s bohemian style. Davis is chewing the rainbow-snake-clad scenery around her, Dinklage matches the regretful gravitas Harrelson brought to the series, and thanks to Schwartzman, there’s even comic relief. (Every time he so much as breathed, I cackled.) While it’s difficult to imagine Songbirds & Snakes replicating the celebrity phenomenon for Blyth or Zegler that it did for Jennifer Lawrence, it does announce them as ones to watch. (Ariana DeBose kinda ate Zegler’s lunch in that West Side Story remake). Blyth’s blank expressions leave ambiguity to his motivation at every turn, and Zegler never lets you look away from her. And, yes, there’s also a complicated love story involving two good-looking people—it wouldn’t be Panem without one.
Of all the near-three-hours films of the year—and 2023 has had a lot—this Hunger Games doesn’t deserve to be compared to the umpteenth action sequels I mentioned earlier, even the ones with steadier filmmaking. The films I thought of most while writing about this star-crossed teen romance with multiple musical sequences were two of this year’s biggest Oscar contenders. A debate about using short-lived violent measures to prevent the large-scale devastation of war: present both here and in Oppenheimer. A man wrestling between his ambition and his feelings for a woman he is actively oppressing: central to both The Hunger Games and Killers of the Flower Moon. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Snow’s future is subject to the political ambitions of those around him, and like Ernest Burkhart, he is losing the battle for the corruption of his soul. Scorsese and Christopher Nolan’s films maybe more “important” because they are telling true stories from the minds of auteurs, but Songbirds & Snakes isn’t “just” a movie about teens, either. Superhero fatigue has left me with franchise cynicism, but I’d take 72 more Hunger Games if they find more regret, tragedy, and injustice to explore.