Was there a demand for a villainous origin story for Coriolanus Snow? I can’t imagine so. He was a fairly standard villain for the dystopian teen sci-fi series as played by Donald Sutherland. I mean, I get that people probably want to make more money off that highly successful series, but is Snow an interesting enough character to warrant what is basically an origin story? Returning series director Francis Lawrence is the only return to this years-earlier set prequel, and it certainly looked a lot like a Hunger Games movie with an up-and-coming starlet as the female lead while some overqualified veterans fill in the adult supporting cast, but again, was anyone that interested in Snow’s backstory?
Regardless, the character got one anyway.
Some time after the war the Districts waged and lost against the Capital of Panem, Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) is living in near poverty with his grandma (Fionnula Flanagan) and cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) despite the fact Coriolanus’s late father was at one time one of the most powerful people in the country. Snow’s hope to lead himself and his family out of their poor status comes from winning a university prize from his school, but there’s a twist this year as there is no money to go out for simply having the top grades but instead by mentoring one of the 24 tributes for the upcoming 10th annual Hunger Games. Snow is then assigned to Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), the female tribute from District 12, a “covey,” or traveling singer/musician that was settled into District 12 by the Peacekeepers at some point. Snow’s future is on the line, and possibly Lucy Gray’s life as well.
As it is, Snow and Lucy Gray both have ideas on how to do things that will look familiar to fans of the original movies. Both have people willing to cut them off, and Panem is not as peaceful as it will be by the time Katniss Everdeen survives her own trip to the arena, so anything they need to do will be no easy task. However, Snow is starting to fall for Lucy Gray, and his friend Sejanus (Zegler’s West Side Story co-star Josh Andrés Rivera), himself originally from a district and something of the conscience of the Capital, seems to be there to suggest there may be another way for Snow to turn out. Sure, this is a prequel, and he will become the Big Bad in the future, so can Snow be at best a deeper or more tragic character than he was previously believed to be?
For me, the best parts of these movies are always the Hunger Games themselves, and I don’t mean just the trip to the arena. I mean all the things that lead into the Hunger Games like stylists, pre-game shows, and a host of other things that show the real way to win is to use the sort of tactics that work on real-world reality TV. The Games themselves can be very entertaining in how they’re set up, and this movie actually sets the Games in an interesting format: they’re kinda new and basically just all the tributes in a small arena with a bunch of weapons and nothing flashier than that. That said, the tributes themselves look a lot shabbier. They include a girl with a persistent cough, a boy missing an arm, and a small girl who looks like she has Downs Syndrome. The Capital isn’t treating them like the pseudo celebrities they will be, and the host of the Games (Jason Schwartzman) is better known as a weather man. Really, the movie works best when the Games are going on.
However, the movie then goes on for a while after the Games end to show the conclusion to Snow’s fall to villainy, and that’s a lot less interesting. Zegler does a lot of singing in the movie, possibly because the movie wanted to show off her singing voice, but it’s still Blyth’s movie, and his Snow is a little hard to pin down. He is allegedly a good kid when we meet him, but some of his actions suggest otherwise, to the point where I’m not sure even the character knows why he does what he does. He’s also rather bland in the role. The veterans on display, such as Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage, and the aforementioned Schwartzman, all bring some life to the movie while acting in very different ways, be it Dinklage’s subdued performance, Davis’s scenery-chewing, or Schwartzman’s comic relief, but this is a movie that focuses on Blyth and Zegler, and neither of their characters could hold my attention for the entire runtime of the movie. Had it ended a half-hour sooner, maybe with a sequel to show more of Snow’s descent and not cram it all into a final act, then I might have found this a better experience.
Grade: C+
0 Comments