What is the genesis of personality in a tyrant or, better, in an authoritarian oligarch? Outside of sociology, but in the dreams (or nightmares) of fiction, this is what the novel is about and what the film will be about. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Nightingale and the Serpent. On the official social channels of the saga, the countdown began: on August 13, 2023, it was actually announced that only 100 days remained before the release of the film in Italian cinemas.
Release date, actors and trailer
At the moment there is no exact date: it is known that the film will be released in November, and to be precise November 17, 2023 in US theaters. Building on movie releases from the launch trilogy The Hunger Games – of which Ballad of the Nightingale and the Serpent is a prequel – it is possible that the Italian giveaway will start immediately after the American date.
As with any self-respecting prequel, the cast was also designed to fit in with the launch trilogy, which has been full of stars in the past: from the main characters Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson, who were not exactly newbies at the time, to proven or just established performers such as Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Donald SutherlandJulianne Moore, before the greats and later Philip Seymour Hoffman.
No one Ballad of the Nightingale and the Serpent the main characters are faces familiar to the youngest to whom the saga is addressed: Coriolana plays Tom Blyth, Lucy Gray as Rachel Zegler, Tigris as Hunter Schafer, and finally Seianus as Josh Andres Rivera. But with adult characters, the casting attracted leading actors: Dean Higbottom is played by Peter Dinklage – who was loved by many for the character of Tyrion Lannister not Game of Thrones – Conductor Lucky Flickerman is played by Jason Schwartzmann, a character actor and son of art with extraordinary and multifaceted talent, Dr. Gol will have the face of an Oscar winner Viola Davis. Also in the cast is Irish actor Fionnula Flanagan, who will appear on screen as Grandmother.
trailer the official version of the prequel was released in April 2023.
Book and series
Author of the entire saga The Hunger Games American writer Suzanne Collins, who has been writing this dystopian series of novels for young people – 4 books in total, based on 5 films – since 2008. The first three volumes, or the starter trilogy, are set in Panem, a sort of involution of the US within a post-apocalyptic scenario. Panem is divided into districts and the capital, the Capitol, where the President lives. Coriolanus Snow, an authoritarian oligarch addicted to terror and poisons, as well as white roses. There are 12 districts in total: there was a thirteenth, but at the beginning of the saga it is said that it was destroyed by nuclear contamination for leading the uprising in the Capitol.
Districts involved in a deadly reality show The Hunger Games. Two “tributes” are chosen from each district, that is, two teenagers, male and female, aged 12 to 18, who will fight to the death in the arena until only one winner remains. But in 74 The Hunger Gamesfrom one of the most peripheral districts, the 12th, a volunteer girl, Katniss Everdeenwhich lifts the spirits of areas long awaiting the leader of a new rebellion.
Ballad of the Nightingale and the Serpent instead, he jumps into the past and starts with tenths The Hunger Games – and those who read the starting trilogy may already have a small spoilers how things played out in that episode was a mystery to fans until recently. This is the first program broadcast on television, therefore conceived as Reality show complete with sponsors and stakes, and most notably mentors or youngsters hired to lead the tribute to victory – or rather, survival.
One such tutor is precisely Coriolanus Snow, the future President of Panem, depicted in a period of young post-war family misery, but there are clues in the opening trilogy. Present in the book is actually a character Tigerwhom Katniss meets at the end of the third volume and who is a help to her: the Tiger is the cousin of Coriolanus, and for a while she will become a stylist The Hunger Games. Finally, other mentors (whose last names are, for example, Heavensby and Crane) e happy flickerman let readers and viewers imagine that these characters are the ancestors of the characters in the first books, respectively the reality strategists and the storytellers present.
Dystopia among dystopias
“It’s what we love the most that’s destroying us“. It was this phrase that was spoken in the first films by Sutherland, who was the elder Coriolanus. Coriolanus has ambivalent character, always oscillates between a sense of the status quo ante (military) and evil. Not everyone was happy about it. Ballad of the Nightingale and the Serpent was focused on him, a negative character, although in a certain sense on a round one, but we must not forget that Collins wrote a dystopia, and a dystopia should not reassure.
In the dystopia The Hunger Gamesas in other dystopias, real events of human history are used: human tributes are inspired Greek mythologyespecially stories about the Minotaur, propaganda resembles propaganda totalitarian regimes of the twentieth centuryespecially Bolshevism. In the images of the trailer, the photo vaguely resembles the rallies of Nazi Germany: it is no coincidence that the shooting took place in Germany and Poland.
And of course in The Hunger Games there is no shortage of the role of the senses in a totalitarian regime. As it actually happened in 1984 In George Orwell, love becomes the object of interest of the oligarchs: Coriolanus, a kind of new Big Brother, pulls the strings of a society that is afraid of any expression. But like the first books The Hunger Games they taught, perhaps Coriolanus, perhaps not the most evil character in all of Panem.