Hollywood was by no means going to cease making extra Starvation Video games motion pictures. Based mostly on Suzanne Collins’s best-selling dystopian young-adult novels, the primary 4 movies launched from 2012 to 2015 collectively grossed almost $3 billion worldwide. They dominated popular culture: Jennifer Lawrence turned a bona fide film star; movies on replicate her character’s aspect braid flooded the web; the phrase starvation video games turned shorthand for any type of intense competitors. We noticed a wave of copycat franchises—Divergent, The Maze Runner, and The Mortal Devices, amongst many, many others—that by no means reached The Starvation Video games degree of success.
But the prequel hitting theaters this weekend, titled The Starvation Video games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, is not any mere franchise extension. Sure, it tells the origin story of the sequence’ villain—President Coriolanus Snow, performed by Donald Sutherland within the authentic movies—and sure, it takes viewers again to Panem, the oppressive nation that forces kids to slaughter each other in annual televised battle royales, nevertheless it additionally treads contemporary territory. The movie poses a query the earlier Starvation Video games motion pictures largely averted: How precisely did the Video games change into such a cultural phenomenon—and why can we, by extension, nonetheless have an urge for food for extra?
That will sound too meta and heady for a YA sequence that after positioned a heavy emphasis on which suitor its heroine would select (Crew Peeta, clearly), however Ballad organically weaves a critique of its personal franchise’s success into the story. The movie follows Coriolanus (Tom Blyth) as a younger man, and research, by way of his trajectory, how the Video games turned must-watch programming. When Ballad begins, Coriolanus is a prime pupil on the Capitol—the house of Panem’s privileged ruling class—determined to win his faculty’s prestigious prize in order that his household can proceed residing among the many rich. To take action, he should mentor a tribute (one of many Video games’ individuals) and create the type of drama that may revive the Video games.
A decade in, the occasion has come to really feel uninteresting and routine, neither entertaining the individuals of the Capitol nor punishing these within the poor districts that rebelled and led to the creation of the Video games. However Coriolanus has concepts, together with making the viewers care extra deeply in regards to the tributes as precise people—a objective that ultimately impacts his understanding of himself. This can be a movie, then, that considers the ability of storytelling and spectacle—and the way common narratives can form worldviews, promote concepts, and corrupt anybody.
The preliminary Starvation Video games movies lined comparable floor—Katniss (Lawrence) had picture consultants and sat by way of loads of interviews to win favors—however by no means as explicitly or as persistently as Ballad does. Katniss was by no means a pure onstage, however each Coriolanus and his assigned tribute, Lucy Grey Baird (West Aspect Story’s Rachel Zegler), are performers at coronary heart. He’s pretending to be as rich as his classmates are, retaining his household’s poverty a secret and manipulating these round him. She’s a gifted singer, unprepared for the horrors of the Video games however plucky sufficient to appeal individuals together with her voice and enigmatic sufficient to maintain her mentor guessing. The Starvation Video games franchise examined the affect of propaganda by way of Katniss’s discomfort with being an emblem, however Ballad scrutinizes these concepts additional by constructing them into its central plot. Coriolanus and Lucy Grey should appeal to assist from the Video games’ viewers; as they do, their relationship blossoms right into a romance that’s by no means on strong footing. The movie attracts stress from the way in which each Coriolanus and Lucy Grey study to idiot their audiences—and one another.
That romance is essential to creating Ballad really feel completely different from The Starvation Video games of yesteryear. Katniss’s story was a couple of political awakening, and the movies have been a couple of wide-scale revolution. Although its 158-minute runtime signifies in any other case, Ballad has a tighter, extra intimate focus. Coriolanus, by way of the completely different chapters of his coming-of-age, comes to appreciate that the best software for survival is an effective story. That helps him information Lucy Grey within the Video games, win approval within the Capitol when the chances are in opposition to his favor, and make Ballad’s predetermined ending—Coriolanus’s flip to the darkish aspect—significant fairly than perfunctory.
As a viewer, I discovered myself rooting for Coriolanus, as a result of the movie regularly locations him in characteristically heroic positions: the underdog in his class, one half of a star-crossed romance. When he continued the cycle of violence, I felt crushed however unsurprised. The movie isn’t making an attempt to humanize him; as an alternative, it reveals how he involves do what most individuals are likely to do in actual life: He chooses the simpler narrative, the another individuals—together with himself—are keen to simply accept. In fact the Academy’s prime pupil has to ultimately lead Panem’s regime.
That’s the key to The Starvation Video games longevity. On the web page and on the display, the story carried a subtly cynical streak. Like the opposite dystopian sci-fi book-to-film diversifications that adopted, it centered on kids rebelling in opposition to authority to reform a world that older generations ruined—a resonant thought for younger individuals rising up amid seemingly countless tragedies. However not like these different titles, The Starvation Video games underlined Panem’s use of soppy energy, and confirmed how intently it resembles the world we dwell in.
The Video games are designed to be televised, and showmanship is as a lot of a ability as, say, with the ability to shoot a bow and arrow. In Ballad, the designer of the Video games—performed by a scene-stealing Viola Davis—is as highly effective as Coriolanus will later be. And the Video games’ host, Fortunate Flickerman (a splendidly hammy Jason Schwartzman), sprinkles his commentary with pithy observations for the plenty watching. After a tribute carries out a mercy kill and earns a reward out of viewer sympathy, Fortunate injects a bit of recommendation like he’s educating a lesson. “That’s what occurs once you do stuff,” he says. “You get consideration.”
Ballad could also be bloated, nevertheless it understands that The Starvation Video games, as a franchise, didn’t succeed as a result of it had a transparent political philosophy. (If something, it was obscure sufficient for any social gathering to latch on to.) It succeeded as a result of it entertained; it did stuff—stuff similar to forged a famous person at a pivotal level in her profession and popularize a subgenre earlier than the copycats got here alongside—and it obtained consideration. However greater than something, The Starvation Video games instructed a narrative that bolstered its viewers’s notions of excellent and evil. As a lot as Ballad is reviving the franchise as a result of the unique installments made billions, it additionally acknowledges—and interrogates—the truth that the Video games themselves have been by no means the draw. The reassurance that at the very least our world isn’t but as bleak as that of Panem is sufficient.
