“I think there’s a natural goodness built into human beings. You know when you’ve stepped across the line into evil, and it’s your life’s challenge to try and stay on the right side of that line.” – Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes)

⚠️There are a few spoilers ahead, so beware if you have not watched the movie yet.⚠️

Movie Summary:

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was released in 2023 and was (of course) based on a book written by Suzanne Collins in 2020. This movie was released 8 years after the previous movie in the series, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2.” Years before becoming the tyrannical president of Panem, Coriolanus Snow, who’s 18, is his fading lineage’s last hope. With the 10th annual Hunger Games coming up, Coriolanus Snow is caught off guard when he’s assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird who is in District 12. They unite their instincts for showmanship and political savvy, and race against time to reveal who’s actually a songbird and who’s a snake.

This movie is simply a nice 4/5. Here’s the pros and cons.

Pros:

• It felt like a pretty good adaptation to the original book, with most of the important parts of the book being included in the movie. Meaning if you didn’t read the book, it would be easy for you to understand what’s going on.

• You could almost SEE Coriolanus Snow’s inner thoughts simply by movement of his eyes, small twists and furrows of his lips or eyebrows, etc. What I’m trying to say is his actor, Tom Blyth, did a good job at playing his role as the younger version of Coriolanus Snow.

• With the movie being 2 hours and 40 minutes long, it didn’t feel too dragged out or overdone. It was a pretty good time frame for the movie.

• This Hunger Games movie had a fantastic soundtrack, which really brought the movie up.

• This movie was a LOT better than the Mockingjay movies in my opinion. Everything felt better in general compared to both part 1 and 2 of Mockingjay.

Cons:

• I think this movie could have been split up into two parts, which would have been a lot more justifiable than the split of Mockingjay. This would help with some of the lost details that they didn’t include in this movie. (The movie was 2 hours and 40 minutes long too, so if they chose to split it up, we’d have more details in each parts of the movies.)

• While they had a majority of the important parts in the movie from the book, there were still quite a few parts I would have liked to see in the movie.

• The music and singing in this movie was good, but felt a bit unnecessary at times. I can admit, the singing was good, but was just a bit random at times.

• There are not entirely good transitions from certain parts of the story to another. Kinda just seems like the story jumped around a little.