00:00The Hunger Games' The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is, simply put, structurally broken.
00:06The film seems to reach a natural end point when its iteration of The Hunger Games concludes.
00:11But it then turns out that we're only at the end of Act 2,
00:14and there's a whole other section of the movie that goes on for the best part of an hour,
00:18so that was already bad enough.
00:20Worse still, this final act fails to definitively explain why Coriolanus Snow,
00:25here, played by Tom Blythe, became the cruel and ruthless leader he was in the original films,
00:32where he was played by the late, great Donald Sutherland, of course.
00:35Thanks to the structural and narrative issues,
00:37this ended up being the worst Hunger Games film to date, by a clear mile,
00:42with even the divisive Mockingjay Part 2 soaring high above it.
00:46How to fix it, then?
00:47Well, simple, just end the story where it felt like it was gonna bloody end.
00:51The film's writers could have definitely found a way to conclude the story of Coriolanus
00:55and his love interest Lucy in a shorter time frame.
00:59Yes, this wasn't how things played out in the novel,
01:01but the novel has been divisive among fans anyhow,
01:03so a bit of deviation would not have hurt in the slightest here.
01:07People change things during movie adaptations all the damn time.
