{"id":44608,"date":"2023-11-14T11:28:28","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T11:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/?guid=b3cfb1250e01477c92373693c5462d5c"},"modified":"2023-11-14T11:28:28","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T11:28:28","slug":"the-hunger-games-the-ballad-of-songbirds-snakes-lopsided-prequel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/14\/the-hunger-games-the-ballad-of-songbirds-snakes-lopsided-prequel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes \u2013 lopsided prequel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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G<\/span>ood filmmaking is all about knowing when to stop. Yes, there are cool camera moves and killer line readings and blissful moments of high drama, but if at the end of the day a film outstays its welcome, then all of those little wins count for nothing.<\/p>\n

Francis Lawrence\u2019s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time \u2013 a serviceable B-movie which replays the series\u2019 inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer want to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup.<\/p>\n

For those following, this new film, which arrives some eight years after Katniss Everdeen wrapped things up in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay \u2013 Part 2<\/a>, is a Phantom Menace-esque prequel which tells the origin story of young, lovely, kindly, studious, poverty-stricken Coreolanus Snow, played Tom Blythe, and how he grows up to become the markedly more charismatic evildoer, Donald Sutherland, from the original saga. And even though the film appears to go through great pains to explain this formative embrace of the dark side, it\u2019s done in a way that\u2019s so obscure and artificial that it makes precious little sense.<\/p>\n

We join matters at the point where the annual Hunger Games are stuck in a bit of a rut from a TV audience perspective. As this is the early years, the unlucky \u201ctributes\u201d now duke it out in a closed coliseum, and Snow alongside the esteemed members of his graduating class are told that there\u2019s one final task to complete before a coveted scholarship is awarded: they must mentor the tributes and goad them into being more entertaining. Snow is paired with a sassy warbler from District 12 named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) who likes nothing more than to express herself through song. Repeatedly.<\/p>\n

One thing here that\u2019s problematic is that even the games themselves seem dull, so it\u2019s quite a stretch to accept that they would\u2019ve become a cultural phenomenon in their time. Watching amateurs fighting is actually very tedious and is over very quickly: just ask Harmony Korine who attempted to make (and then sagely abandoned) an entire feature film<\/a> in which he\u2019s beaten up by strangers.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere we\u2019ve got Jason Schwartzman goofing around as the new Hunger Games live TV anchor, and there\u2019s a scenery-chewing Viola Davis in cracked make-up and garish designer duds as the loopy scientist who every year is charged with keeping the game ticking. Both do well to keep things lively while they\u2019re on screen, but their presence is double-edged, as the film dies a death when they\u2019re swept aside before the soul-sapping final act kicks off.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s strange for a film which, up to a point, seems to be offering a sly critique on marketing, media manipulation and pandering to the basest instincts of an audience in the craven search for ratings, to swerve so fatefully into terrain which unequivocally tests the patience of even the most hardened of Hunger Head. The question, then, is why do we get this extraneous chunk of film served up to us in the first place?<\/p>\n

Well, it\u2019s all to do with a misguided belief born in the boardroom that audiences love franchise connectivity. Rather than leave something poetically unsaid, to marinate in the imaginations of the viewer, a film like this is all about pernickety gap-filling and expositional closure, because that, apparently, is what the people want. It\u2019s a leap to think anyone genuinely cared about the early years of the Hunger Games antagonist anyway, but this film sits awkwardly between a water-testing spin-off mini franchise, and an attempt to cram everything there is into a single sitting \u2013 entertainment be damned!<\/p>\n

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