Film Name: 饥饿游戏：鸣鸟与蛇之歌 / The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
I didn’t expect the Hunger Games franchise, which I wasn’t a big fan of back in the day, to touch me with a prequel after all these years.
The fact that The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (hereinafter referred to as “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes”) left such a good impression on me is largely due to a mismatch in “movie-going expectations. After all, I went into it as a big bad movie, but I was pleasantly surprised. ……
What’s more, I hadn’t done any homework on the film beforehand, just relying on my past impression of The Hunger Games, thinking that it was another anti-utopian work focusing on “love and peace”, and ignoring the fact that the protagonist’s last name is “Snow”, until the end of the film when I realized that the protagonist is a villain in the traditional sense, and that he is the “President Snow” of the beneficiary country in the main work. “It wasn’t until the end of the film that I realized the protagonist was traditionally a villain, and that he was President Snow, the benefactor of the original film.
That’s the right flavor, I like this kind of creative “backbone”.
(Friendly reminder: there will be spoilers below.)
Let me first explain why I didn’t like The Hunger Games movie series: mainly because it was just a sci-fi teenage anti-utopia, with too much popcorn, and I always felt that the depictions of tyranny and revolution in it were too much of a child’s play. …… I was able to watch all four The Hunger Games movies back in the day. The Hunger Games” back in the day, more because I would watch almost all the imported movies/Hollywood hits.
That explains why I didn’t care for The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes at first.
Of course, I’m not saying that this movie is that good, at least in terms of the female lead, the value of pulling a lot – “big cousin” Jennifer Lawrence’s image and performance for “The Hunger Games” is a plus, “the new Snow White” Rachel Ziegler is not so pleasant. Rachel Ziegler, the “new Snow White,” is not as likable, except for her singing, which is not much of a highlight, more like a newcomer looking for a new look because of her good resources.
Fortunately, the core of the movie is the hero Coriolanus Snow’s growing experience, 18-year-old down-and-out aristocrat Corio was chosen as a mentor for the 10th Hunger Games, and Lucy Grey, a poor girl from District 12, becomes a community of blessing and misfortune…….
But this brings up another problem; the explicit Hunger Games are not the most important.
It should be said that the specific execution of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes isn’t great, and even though it’s been broken up into three chapters to aid the narrative, it’s still a little too long.
In unusual stories, the second act that carries the story forward is often the climactic scene, but in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, the second chapter that showcases the Hunger Games is conversely the weakest, with most of the points of interest tucked away in the first and third chapters.
While the film shows a live Hunger Games broadcast in its first foray into the medium with excellent technology and settings, displaying an audio-visual style that is both sci-fi and classical, there is an imbalance in the pacing that doesn’t add much color to the film.
If none of these flaws mean anything to you, then we can talk about the movie’s strengths.
At the center of it all is one question: does Coriolio have any understanding, goodwill, or compassion for Lucy (and the other “tributes”)? As we will see, the movie is full of contradictory portrayals.
On the one hand, Corio is a downtrodden aristocrat who has tasted hunger and understands human suffering, and is more able to empathize with the poor than other young ladies in the Capitol District, while he is good friends with the openly progressive-minded Sejenas Prince, and does give Lucy a lot of care and help;
On the other hand, Corio is a nobleman who wants to restore his family’s glory in every way possible, and his high grades and cheating at games are all designed to fulfill his goal of moving up the ladder.
The most plausible explanation for this is that “he is both good and ambitious”, and the first two chapters are full of such plausible confusion.
It is precisely because of this uncertainty that I felt confused when I read the third chapter – Corio’s words and actions are too “one thing leads to another”, at one time he is reformed and even wants to go far away, and at another time he is scheming and even sells out his friends and kills them! …… Until I realized that Corio is an unscrupulous “villain”, it was all self-explanatory.
In contrast, Sejanus and Headmaster Hepton (Peter Dinlage) are what I would have expected to see as “betrayers of the class”.
Sejanus is too young and naïve, angry at the system and sympathetic to the underdog, but unable to use his position to make a difference, lacking the means to make a difference, and dying a sheltered son; Hepton is more mature, but limited, and spends all his time on drugs to numb himself, and his greatest wish is to destroy the Hunger Games that he himself has created.
The immature, half-baked “revolutionaries” are sacrifices to ambitious men of will and strength.
Corio’s difficult upbringing has reinforced his reckless desire for power. He became close friends with Sejenas because he wanted to get on the Prince family’s good side; he touched and helped Lucy because he really wanted to win the Hunger Games; and even if he was sent to the frontier, he wanted to go to District 12, where he had connections, and seize the opportunity to stomp on someone else and get back to the center of power. Back to the center of power.
Corio may have sympathized with the idea of betraying his own class …… but it is nothing compared to his ambition.
At the end of the film, the conversation between the victorious Corio and Dr. Gower is the most typical, as he explains his understanding of the Hunger Games: he used to think of them as a way to punish the losers or to remind the victors to think of their own safety, but having been down in the grassroots, he understands that the world is a giant arena, and that the Hunger Games can show those at the top who are the winners.
It’s not just anyone who can redefine and second-guess a term or movement that was created at a specific time in history and still be proven to work, and it’s here that Coriolanus Snow began to morph into a true political animal.
The Hunger Games once struck me as fake because America lacked the soil for a bottom-up revolution and couldn’t bloom in the right place; now The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes satisfies me because the direction and flavor of writing about domination and oppression through the eyes of a higher power is spot on-anti-domination and anti-oppression. Now The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes satisfies me because the direction and flavor of writing about domination and oppression from the point of view of the person on top is spot on – it’s just easier for a villain to make a good movie than a good one.
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