The Hunger Games 2023 rips off every mask and takes us into the abyss of the human soul.
Like a Poe novella or a Jung treatise, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, is a beautiful journey into the black holes of our soul.
We attended the premiere of The Hunger Games. We did not expect such beauty and incredible depth from a movie that, while beautiful in the first episodes of the saga, had never taken us to such heights. Just as we turn the pages of Jung's Red Book and see his dark and somber drawings and visions in the mandalas and illustrated trees, Francis Lawrence's story takes us on a wonderful adventure to make us realize how complex, fragile, delicate, and sensitive the human soul is. How we can go from a simple feeling, like pride in belonging to an important but fallen lineage, to becoming murderers, reduced to a heartless soul, a ruthless and unscrupulous person. How love can make us suffer terribly, much more than any evil person can make us suffer. How much does each of us lack to be well with ourselves, to lead us to unbalance to the point of falling madly in love with someone else? It is indeed true that before loving someone else, one should love oneself so much that one is balanced. Those who disappoint us should never make us destroy ourselves.
So the story of the early years of Coriolanus Snow (an amazing Tom Blyth), the villain of The Hunger Games 10 years ago, is a journey for all of us, it is a moment of reflection to make us realize how strong we have to be to try to remain ourselves when we encounter the difficulties of life. Yes, it is true, Lawrence made us wait 10 years to conceive this new beginning, this new journey of discovery of the main character and his broken heart. And we're glad because we admired it: we looked at all the details of the movie and saw that it was taken care of in every little frame.
The overwhelming performance of Viola Davis crowns a first-rate script and direction, and the colors and cinematography are expertly chosen to tell us about a world in which the Hunger Games took place in their 10th edition, not yet completely bleak and gray, but already withering under the rule of dictatorship.
The new heroine of the film, Lucy Gray, played by Rachel Zegler, possesses courage, gentleness and strength, the kind of strength that Coriolanus, the protagonist, lacks as he slowly transforms into the depths. She, the songbird, accompanies the second half of the movie with her songs, lively and sometimes light-hearted. She does not reach inside you like the Katniss of 10 years ago, but the performance is more than enough. If we really have to find a flaw in this Hunger Games 2023 (we do not anticipate any spoilers here), we find it in the too much singing in the second part: maybe a change of music, of voice types, of rhythm, in some moments, would have made it even better. But we are not looking at the song, more or less in the background: we are looking at this spectacle of script and direction, which reminds us not only of Jung and his Red Book, but also of the novellas of Edgar Allan Poe, where, word by word, moment by moment, story by story, we enter more and more into the labyrinths of the hearts of the protagonists, and where going from victim to executioner, from good guy to bad guy, is really a moment. Just like in a tennis match, where maybe one wrong point changes your mind and you lose a game you had in hand.
Excellent, a must see.