Murray Close/Lionsgate

The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was released on November 17, 2023 across America. The movie is a prequel of the infamous Hunger Games franchise and follows the backstory of the villain, Coriolanus Snow. The movie begins during The First Rebellion in The Capital showing a young Coriolanus and Tigris, his cousin, and continues into 10 years after as Coriolanus is assigned to become a mentor in The Games. The goal of the mentors is to create a captivating tribute to make the games more popular with the public. Coriolanus is entrusted with Lucy Gray Baird, a traveling singer with a marvelous spirit and voice from District 12. The movie reveals the relationship between Lucy Gray and Coriolanus, how The Games evolved, and a greater understanding of the Panem world. I particularly enjoyed watching the crumbling of Coriolanus into the President Snow shown in the original series. I loved connecting the subtle details of the characters, songs, costumes, and script with the movie series. Suzanne Collins, the creator and writer of the novels, did an amazing job bridging the ideas, plots, characters, and scripts of the two books. I now have a completely different perspective of the original movies and books after watching this movie on the big screen.
The main characters Lucy Gray and Snow are played by Rachel Zegler and Tom Blythe. Rachel Zegler is well known from her performances in West Side Story and Shazam and has a few new movies coming out such as Paddington in Peru, Snow White, and Spellbound. Her voice is absolutely phenomenal, rooted with amazing emotion and message. Zegler embraced the character remarkably and I thoroughly enjoyed her improvisation during her reaping scene. Some of Blythe’s shows are The Gilded Age, Billy the Kid, and Benediction. He conveyed Snow’s character deterioration as well as his internal conflict displayed in the books exceptionally well and captivated the audience throughout.
I highly recommend The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes; however, you must watch the original four movies first. I also suggest reading the book first, as I have not, and was slightly confused on the characters and plot during the first few scenes. I have been a fan of the books since 2018 and the movies even longer; this movie did not disappoint and has encouraged me to read the prequel!