The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

Plot of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: It is 64 years before the previous story and a young Coriolanus Snow is one of a group of undergraduates who are given the task of mentoring the tributes (the young people sent from the districts to kill each other in the games). He gets a young woman Lucy Gray Baird and prompts Volumnia Gaul, the Head Gamemaker to get the potential audience to support individual tributes. This results in Lucy Gray singing and getting support. On a collective visit to the arena terrorists partially destroy it in an explosion and Lucy Gray saves Coriolanus, prompting him, later, to provide her with some poison. He also programmes the snakes not to bite her in the final moments of the games. But, although Lucy Gray, wins his cheating is found out and he is sent to District 12 as a peacekeeper, together with his friend Sejanus. However Sejanus has an agenda and so, as it turns out, has Coriolanus.

Content: No sex or nudity. Maybe a bit of drinking and  some drug taking now and then. We get  bit of exposition relating to the dystopian future of Panem and how the games came to be. Coriolanus and the other undergrads wear a sort of kilt uniform in red, as opposed to the tributes who wear rags, apart from Lucy Gray who wears a remarkable dress. Before the games the tributes are held in what seems to be a zoo enclosure. Despite the arena being destroyed the games are still held and they young people dash about killing each other or banding together. In the studio the presenter commentates. Once Coriolanus is sent to District 12 as a peacekeeper he is seen in uniform and also more casually dressed in sort of nightclubs. There are hangings of traitors, but nothing too graphic.

A View: I went to see this outing at its first screening in Madrid and there were quite a lot of us there. For me it was the most attractive of what was available, not that I am a Hunger Games fan. The games were depicted as being in their formative years, and so were less attractively presented than the earlier films. In fact it was difficult to see what the “Head Gamemaker” actually did, apart from being evil. I was taken aback by the singing, and wondered if it was there because they had cast a singer, but I actually liked one of the songs. But in summary – over all dull. Wait till it comes out on cable and then get on with your knitting.

Fun Fact: The name “Lucy Gray” is taken from a 1799 poem by William Wordsworth which, it is suggested, has a bearing on the plot.