The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has star power and action, but it lacks its predecessor’s sense of moral lucidity.

To its credit, the original Hunger Games trilogy had a certainty of intention: to make clear that war is a nightmare, even when it feels necessary, and the only way out of it is through brutality that might kill your spirit if it doesn’t kill your body first. Suzanne Collins spun three solid YA novels out of that straightforward anti-violence idea, and the Jennifer Lawrence–starring films stuck closely and effectively to the books’ conception of totalitarianism and revolution. In its return to Panem, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes isn’t missing star power; Viola Davis is going full Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending, and her commitment to maniacal menace is a treat. The same goes for Jason Schwartzman, who plays the Hunger Games’s first host as a social climber disappointed with having to miss a dinner reservation because the child slaughter is going longer than he anticipated. And there’s enough action, too, in a dialed-down version of the Hunger Games that, lacking sponsors and donations, is driven primarily by the contestants’ ferocity. What The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes can’t evoke, though, is The Hunger Games’ sense of moral lucidity. It’s all thematically muddled, narratively regurgitated stuff that makes the film feel like a nearly three-hour backsliding of this franchise’s onetime political forcefulness.

Based on Collins’s 2020 prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes rewinds the Hunger Games timeline by nearly 70 years to focus on Coriolanus Snow. In the first three novels, he’s Panem’s scheming, bloodthirsty president; in Songbirds and Snakes, he’s a child during the First Rebellion and a teenager when the Hunger Games are a decade old. The focus is a year or so in Snow’s life, and part of the issue with the film adaptation from franchise director Francis Lawrence and co-writers Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt is that such a sliver of time is simply not enough to build a coherent portrait of who Snow is. His turn to the dark side is predetermined, yet The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes doesn’t take the time to convince us another option ever existed.

Sometimes The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes feels like a Nicholas Sparks throwback about the unlikely romance between a sassy Southern girl and a more straitlaced military guy; consider the promo still of Snow with a buzzcut and dog tags, lounging with his love interest by a lake. Other times the film is about the failure of the neoliberal change-comes-from-within promise, and about the soul-crushing pressure of paying back student loans, and about the dangers of making new friends. These are all probably recognizable, even relatable, subplots for the film’s intended adolescent audience. But they’re disparate, free-floating ideas that lack a legible ideological throughline. Centering a villain isn’t inherently a mistake, but The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, loaded up as it is with unnecessarily explained, Solo-esque backstory details, never feels intimate enough in its examination of Snow, nor big enough in its consideration of his impact on Panem, to justify his primacy.

Those backstory details are as follows: Snow is the son of a respected general who was killed during the First Rebellion and is in his final year at the Capitol’s Academy. His family is poor, and Snow is banking on receiving the Plinth Prize, a cash scholarship awarded to the top Academy student. There are two people standing in his way: Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, bored), who hates Snow for a too-late-clarified reason, and Head Gamemaker and Department of War leader Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Davis), who announces a change in the rules of the Plinth Prize. For the first time, to battle the low ratings of the Hunger Games, 24 Capitol students will be paired with the 24 tributes from the 12 districts. (The film assumes a high baseline level of Hunger Games knowledge from its viewers, and relies on Dinklage for chunks of exposition that still don’t fill in the gaps for total newcomers.) The student who is the best mentor will win the prize, but “best” doesn’t mean that their tribute should be the victor; Dr. Gaul wants “spectacles, not survivors.” So when Snow is paired with District 12’s Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler, going all-in on a Dolly Parton accent), a singer who tells the Capitol to “kiss my ass” during the Reaping ceremony, he sees an opportunity. Surely this girl, with her rainbow-colored dress, her sonorous voice, and her big mouth, will lead him to victory.

But love gets in the way, if you can believe it! There’s Snow’s love of country, instilled in him since childhood by his patriotic grandmother and his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer), who expect him to follow in his father’s footsteps and rise to a position of leadership. There’s also Snow’s best-friend love for his classmate Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera), a transplant into the Capitol from District 2, where his family became extremely wealthy manufacturing weapons for the First Rebellion. Sejanus is the only Academy student willing to argue against the existence of the Hunger Games, and Snow admires his courage, ineffective as it may be. And it’s hard, the film argues, for Snow not to love Lucy, who the film presents as basically a pop star: charming, off-the-cuff, always ready to take the stage. These relationships pull Snow in various directions, and they pull the film, too; the script sometimes feels like it’s missing chunks of dialogue that would better explain Snow’s conflicting motivations. (There are missed opportunities for character development throughout; the film could have gotten a lot of internal tension out of how much of Snow’s desire to succeed is nature versus nurture, or how much of Lucy’s personality is manufactured for the stage). The Hunger Games had a strong grasp of how propaganda functions and how it bends people toward and away from it. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes wants to make a point about how Panem divides Snow and Lucy, but as serviceable as Blyth and Zelger are as performers, their actual love story needs to be believable for us to notice.

A major flaw is how repetitive this all feels, with various recurring Hunger Games elements used for our emotional manipulation — not just the omnipresence of the “The Hanging Tree” song, the Zegler version of which plays throughout as both the score and diegetic music, but also a scene in which the smaller female tribute from District 11 is killed, resulting in the rage of the larger male tribute from District 11. That exact same scenario occurred with Rue and Thresh in The Hunger Games, and the racial optics of it in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes are still uncomfortable. The production-design team does have a flair for macabre details, like dozens of vats of baby mutts lining a game-maker’s laboratory; an “Enjoy the show!” announcement trilling from the sound system in the Hunger Games arena when the contestants arrive, as if they’re all sitting down for a movie instead of fighting for their lives; and jabberjays in District 12 echoing rebels’ screams as they’re executed at the Hanging Tree made famous by Katniss’s song in Collins’s Mockingjay. And there are a couple of slick visuals, too: a fish-eye lens effect used for Lucy’s initial moments in the arena and a later scene when Snow gets lost in the woods, bound together by a shared disorientation. In those moments, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes feels most worthy of The Hunger Games name — most aware of the nightmarish obedience demanded in this world, and how it inspires both fear and revolt.

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