The newest movie in the Hunger Games series, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes, came out November 17th this year. Fans were excited for this long-awaited addition to the series, despite it not following the original protagonist, Katniss Everdeen.  

This review will contain slight spoilers as to what happens in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes. So if you wish to see the movie for yourself, I suggest reading this after you do so.  

Now that that’s out of the way, I would rate this movie a nine out of ten. The acting was magnificent; Rachel Ziegler, playing the new protagonist Lucy Gray, and Tom Blythe, playing Coriolanus Snow, were genius casting. The duo had great chemistry on screen. 

The soundtrack on this movie was perfect. Zeigler’s powerful voice paired with meaningful lyrics and southern accent created the perfect songs. My personal favorite would have to be “Pure as the Driven Snow.” However, some fans complained that, in the book, the character Coriolanus Snow stayed and watched Lucy the entirety of this song, which conflicted with the movie because he left halfway through the song to follow his friend. 

This complaint aligns with the reason I removed one point. This movie was originally supposed to be three hours and forty minutes long, and it was shaved down to be only two hours and forty minutes. That is an entire hour missing from the movie, and it shows. Instead of seeing Snow’s slow descent into madness, we see it all happen in less than thirty minutes.  

I would love to see this movie from Lucy Gray’s point of view. We were able to see it briefly while she was in the actual games, but that was only a small portion of the movie. I would like to see what she was thinking during the final scenes in which she ran away from Snow.  

I also loved the frequent references to the older Hunger Games movies. Lucy Gray’s final words to Snow, telling him she is going to collect Katniss, the plant, make this movie much more impressive. I also enjoyed the talk of mocking jays; it explained why Snow was so afraid of Katniss in the earlier films.  

And so, I hope anyone and everyone, even those who do not enjoy The Hunger Games series finds the time to watch this movie, as it is truly one of the best I have ever seen.