The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

Skippable, and this is the page where the chronological toggle on this site is a trap. It sits first in Panem's timeline and it is the worst possible film to start with, because the entire thing is constructed out of dramatic irony. You are watching a young man make a series of small, defensible choices, and the only reason any of them land is that you already know exactly what he turns into. Watched first, it is a straight story about an ambitious student.

Sixty-four years before Katniss, the Games are a shabby, badly attended broadcast held in a bombed-out arena that nobody enjoys, and the Capitol is poor enough that its best students are hungry. That is the most interesting thing the film has: it shows the Games being invented as entertainment, in real time, by people workshopping sponsorship and betting and a presenter because the ratings are bad. The institution the other films treat as monolithic turns out to have been improvised by a handful of academics within living memory.

It is told in three clearly separated parts and the third is where opinion divides. The Games end with about fifty minutes left, the film relocates to District 12, and the register changes to something slower and more pastoral. Some find that the most interesting stretch, since it is where Snow actually becomes Snow; others find it a second film attached to the first. At a hundred and fifty-seven minutes both camps have a point.

Tom Blyth is very good at playing somebody who believes his own account of himself, and Rachel Zegler's performances of the songs are the film's best asset. Viola Davis is operating in a different register from everyone else. Watch it after the original four, where it works, or not at all.