157 min | PG-13 | November 17, 2023 | Lionsgate
Decades before he rules Panem, Coriolanus Snow is a broke aristocrat assigned to mentor a tribute in the tenth Hunger Games. Tom Blyth plays the future dictator as a young man discovering that love and power cannot share the same room. The film makes you watch a monster get built, and it mostly does the job.
Coriolanus Snow is eighteen and broke. His family name still carries weight in the Capitol but the money is gone. The Academy assigns him to mentor Lucy Gray Baird, a tribute from impoverished District 12, in the tenth annual Hunger Games. This is the origin story of the dictator who will rule Panem in the later films. The film wants to show the exact moments when a charming young man trades his decency for power. It is about how the Capitol manufactures its spectacle and its monsters in the same factory.
Tom Blyth plays Coriolanus Snow with a smile that never reaches his eyes. He lets you watch the calculation run underneath every act of kindness. Rachel Zegler plays Lucy Gray Baird as a performer who survives by knowing when to sing. Her musical numbers land because Zegler treats them as strategy and not decoration. Viola Davis plays Dr. Volumnia Gaul with reptilian relish and turns the head gamemaker into the film’s clearest villain. Peter Dinklage plays Dean Casca Highbottom as a man drowning his guilt in morphling.
Francis Lawrence returns to direct after handling the previous three films. The screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt adapts Suzanne Collins’s novel and keeps its three-part structure intact. That structure is the problem. The first two parts build the games with patience and the third part sprints through a District 12 epilogue that needs its own movie. The production design earns its keep. The tenth games take place in a bombed-out concrete arena with exposed tunnels and no polish, and the contrast with the sleek arenas of the later films makes the Capitol’s evolution visible.
The film works best when it stays inside the arena and watches Snow learn what he is willing to do. It works least when it compresses a novel’s worth of plot into its closing stretch. The ideas are sharper than the execution. This is a prequel that understands its own villain and trusts the audience to watch him become inevitable. It does not flinch from the conclusion that the monster was always there. That conviction is what separates it from the franchise filler it could have been.