The original Hunger Games series was a “baby’s first revolutionary politics” phenomenon, dazzling swaths of young people first as a series of novels by Suzanne Collins, then as a quartet of films starring Jennifer Lawrence. Collins’s books were inspired by her own discomfort with the politics of spectacle that fuelled the Iraq War, an illusion of patriotism screened on 24/7 news channels. And now, just in time for the Hunger Games prequel film, we have an entirely new generation of disillusioned teens – young people who might see something recognisable in a story of demonisation and oppression, in which the well-heeled citizens of Panem’s Capitol call the masses, housed in 12 Districts, “animals” and pit them against each other.
Yet The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, directed by franchise regular Francis Lawrence, dilutes those messages beyond any practical use. It’s the origin story of Panem’s chief sociopath, president Coriolanus Snow (played by Donald Sutherland in the original films), that instead feels like the yassification of a future monster.
