25 Dec 2023, 21:29

I really liked The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

It exceeded my expectations for the YA dystopia genre. I never read the books, because the fad hit its stride when I was just exiting my YA phase. And I think I wrote off the entire series because I mentally associated it with Twilight nonsense.

Honestly though, I recently rewatched the entire film series and now feel like I was actually too young to understand it when it first came out. Propaganda, the main theme of the series, was too big of a word for me at the time. The events of Mockingjay are surprisingly topical to current events, and the series got better with each successive instalment.

My Jewish arse watched the new prequel on Christmas Eve, the very last day of it being shown in cinemas in my local area, so it may be too late for most people to catch it in on the big screen now. But I’d recommend streaming/pirating it; don’t write it off for its target audience. The storytelling is heavy-handed in places, but the themes are surprisingly mature.