If you have been on any form of social media in the past week you would know the new Hunger Games Prequel, “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” came out recently. 

This movie was greatly anticipated, especially by the target audience of Gen Z, who grew up reading the Hunger Games books. Shortly after the book’s popularity we were given even more to obsess over with the iconic movie series, following the books.

Needless to say this movie had a lot of high expectations for people. Personally, I went in with much lower standards than most. As I see it, this movie not only had to live up to the book series but the beloved movie series as well; which made it more and more likely to fail. After having viewed the movie I was thankfully proved wrong.

The movie focuses on the future President Snow (Tom Blyth), and his rise to power, as well as the challenges he faced on his way to the top. An origin story for a villain. It was at times however difficult to remember he was a villain, as the director and the numerous other people working on the film made the main character as appealing as possible to distract from the very real, and very immoral actions he took throughout the entire movie. Trust me on this, immoral was the correct word for that sentence.

Coriolanus Snow is the main focus of the movie. So therefore it would make sense that he obtained the most amount of character development. The entire movie felt as if you were slowly watching him become more and more of a psychopath who gets off on watching others in pain, which conflicted with his need to survive, or as he put it, end up on top. This conflict at points overpowers the outward conflicts presented with the actual Hunger Games. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

In some cases the individual stories of someone struggling between survival and morals is more interesting than the overall dystopia that controls the world. As much as the dystopia of the Hunger Games represents a world that we don’t want to imagine that we are capable of, we will always prefer individual suffering over what a society as a whole is capable of. 

Unfortunately because of this heavy focus on Snow and personal deterioration of a soul, some of the other well deserving characters were not developed as thoroughly as they could have been. Such as Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrès Rivera), and Tigris Snow (Hunter Schafer) as well as many others. Although arguably the one I personally felt most robbed by was the portrayal of Lucy Gray Baird.

Now don’t make any mistakes: I thought Rachel Zegler did a phenomenal job in her role; however, I also think she did the best she could with what was given to her. Lucy Gray has a lot of layers to her character, which as a side effect of the main focus being on one particular character, gave less time for her character’s intricacies to be explored. Although at the same time her mystery made her a fascinating character for an audience to pick apart, so ultimately it worked.

As for the trailer, she should not have played such an active role. There is one line in particular used in the trailer that was meant to hook the audience, get them to take notice of the character so they are invested in her story, so they feel obligated to go purchase a ticket and see what happens to her. I believe the line was something like, “Start acting like I can win”, which does not hold nearly the same impact as it does in the trailer, because all we know about this character are surface level qualities. Nothing that would give us the same reaction we had to the trailer. The trailer allows an audience to make assumptions about the characters before we even see the movie, and in this case I feel the movie could only benefit from the line being removed.

In short I would highly recommend this movie. For all of its flaws it has a redeeming quality to back it up, and so much to uncover and analyze. It will certainly keep your brain busy, with the numerous plot twists and turns, and the acting will keep you invested whether you want to or not. In short my expectations for the movie were exceeded by at least a few hundred miles, and is absolutely worth every second of your time.