This past weekend, I saw The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the newest addition to the blockbuster Hunger Games franchise. I begrudgingly drove my younger brother and his friend to the theater for their second movie of the day, lugging my Thanksgiving feast-filled stomach with me. I would have rather stayed at home. I expected the movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ book, a prequel to the other books in The Hunger Games trilogy, to be just as lackluster as the barrage of prequels, sequels, and remakes that have plagued theater-goers for the last decade. Yet, I found myself pleasantly surprised. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, though at times lacking emotional depth, is a solid, adequate adaptation. 

At the center of the story is a teenage Coriolanus Snow and his rise through the ranks toward his eventual presidency. The challenge any villain origin story faces is making a main character engaging and relatable, even when they are doing something particularly evil. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes solves this problem with Tom Blyth, who brings charm and raw emotion to the screen. Blyth makes us root for his character, Corio, the scrappy son of a once-great and powerful man, trying to claw his way back into power despite his grumbling stomach. Blyth’s Snow is charismatic, calculating, and ruthless, opposite Rachel Zegler’s vivacious Lucy Gray Baird. Zegler, given her outstanding performance in Spielberg’s West Side Story, is an understandable choice to portray Baird’s wandering bard character. At times, her acting comes across as a trademark musical theater performance, which undermines some of the more emotional scenes with Blyth’s character. 

The show is stolen by Jason Schwartzman’s portrayal of Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman, who brings a poignant humor against the otherwise grim backdrop of teenage massacre. For Flickerman, narrating the games is a big break —  a more visible role than his previous weatherman assignments — but he finds himself in way over his head, unable to completely comprehend how he found himself the commentator of such violence Schwartzman brings an element of dazed, joyful bewilderment to this role that sharply contrasts the bloodshed and offers a thoughtful commentary next to other characters’ more activist reactions to innocent death.

The performances of Hunter Schafer, Viola Davis, and Peter Dinklage all stand out. Schafer shines as the caring older cousin — one of the only characters who tells Coriolanus what the entire audience is thinking. Davis’ Dr. Gaul is a genuinely malevolent presence in this movie in a skin-crawling, sinister way that would inspire any movie antagonist. Dinklage’s Dean Highbottom, in contrast, offers a rounder, more nuanced antagonist. In Highbottom, we see the tortured artist, disturbed by his own creation: the Games themselves. Highbottom is forced to watch his Games run amok, controlled by sadistic and power-hungry forces that leave him to rot in his own Morphling addiction. I have some sympathy for the man, and yet none whatsoever.

This movie, on the whole, is deeply unsettling. Though a similar premise to the original trilogy, making the main character Snow instead of the plucky, determined Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) lends a more melancholy and hopeless air to the Games themselves. The outcome of the movie was portrayed in the original Hunger Games trilogy and thus comes as no surprise; this prequel establishes the dystopian world that a future heroine will rectify. However, that doesn’t mean that seeing Panem go from bad to worse is any less depressing.

There were a couple times while watching this movie that I had to remind myself that it wasn’t real — something that doesn’t typically happen to me in fantasy movies. Perhaps it’s because this movie seemed shockingly timely: there was the slaughter of innocent young people, the power-hungry young politician not scared of stepping on toes (or cutting them off). The parallels aren’t necessarily fully formed, but they feel relevant given the current political climate.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a movie that the filmmakers clearly put effort into — and in some ways, they succeed. The cast is stellar, recruiting some new faces alongside a few big names. The costumes are fabulous, the plot feels sufficiently original while inserting just enough easter eggs to appeal to The Hunger Games fanatics. The explosions are large; there is some romance, some betrayal, there are ballads, there are songbirds, there are snakes. It’s all thoroughly entertaining. Is it the most amazing movie ever? No. But it pulls itself up by its bootstraps and hoists itself above mediocrity.