Control Review: Hunger Games Ballad
I, Daniel Trump, aka Dalton Lewis, don’t feel qualified to review the Hunger Games movie — entitled The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I like to think that reviewers try to write without any sense of emotional bias. They think with their brains. An honest evaluation requires a critique of the film as a work of art.
I can’t do that because I fucking loved this film. I have no intellectual response to it. Nothing occurs to me to say about its irony or symbolism. It just blew me away. It blew a lot of people away, too — it had a very small second-weekend drop-off, signifying a hit movie.
I loved the main characters, Corio Snow and Lucy Gray. They are two of my favorite characters in a story in a long, long time. Corio Snow is an ambitious poor boy who wants to make it in life and who wants to impress the rich and powerful. He has nothing and wants to have everything, and yet he loves and cares for his family and tries desperately to help anyone on his side. Watching his character progression is an amazing feat of writing — to show us a character turn into something inevitable and sad. Lucy Gray, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air: a powerful female who doesn’t punch three hundred pound men or act like a girlboss. She’s a girl, a singer, arrogant, self-involved, determined, and mysterious and enigmatic. Oh, and she sings a lot, and very well.
There was no intellectual dissection of the movie’s merits. I didn’t evaluate for symbolism or irony. The structure — bizarre as it was — didn’t bother me.
The movie is about the tenth Hunger Games, an arena in which people fight to the death for the amusement of the viewing public. This is set many years before the birth of Katniss, the badass hero of the original trilogy of Hunger Games books. We learn about the youth of Coriolanus Snow — who will become the leader of the country in the far future. He is, strangely, a character who is given great sympathy and pathos in the story. We end up loving him as we see him fall and turn to evil and the Capitol over the Districts. This sympathy for what is thought of as a terrible person is a stroke of genius by Suzanne Collins, the writer of the series of books on which this is based.
He is assigned to mentor one of the tributes — participants in the Hunger Games. Her name is Lucy Gray, and she is a female singer, an artist and harlequin. She doesn’t fight much — she dodges pretty well but doesn’t punch people very often. Corio has to figure out how to help her win the Hunger Games without throwing a punch. That’s an interesting twist on the usual fighting that these movies provide. I have seen so many weak, small people fight brilliantly — I am sick of movies where everyone is an expert combatant. This movie is not that. This movie has flawed characters. Oh, the thought! Flawed characters! I know. It’s unheard of in Hollywood. But it happens in this story, and it’s glorious.
This movie is also long, and it doesn’t always follow its own plot, ignoring said plot to focus on the characters for stretches of the film and meandering away from the Hunger Games themselves for the last hour of the film.
Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage show up for a bit as the makers of the games. They are great in every scene they are given. They play villains that you can sympathize with as you hate them: a rare and powerful trait for an actor to possess.
The problem? I am jealous. This movie does things that I cannot in a story. That’s the next thing for me — to emulate a story like this and write something with the depth and complexity of this story. Once I can do that I will be a lot more satisfied with where I am as a person and a novelist.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
