The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes has been around for a couple of years. If you are a Hunger Games fan, you probably wonder where I’ve been all this time, but I just noticed this one streaming on Peacock and took a look.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is an origin story, a prequel. It tells how Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) came to be the evil autocrat he turned out to be.

In the beginning, Snow was a nice guy. Concerned about his Grandma’am (Fionnula Flanagan) and sister (Hunter Schafer). They didn’t have enough food and were short on rent. He wanted to win as a Hunger Games mentor so he would get money for college and to help his family.

It was year 10 of the Hunger Games. Snow and his friend Sejanus Plinth (Josh Rivera) were both appointed mentors for participants in this year’s games. Snow’s mentee was Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler). He wanted her to survive. He wanted the prize, but he also really liked Lucy Gray.

I liked Lucy Gray too. She got to mention mockingjays and katniss and sing a lot of songs.

The best parts of the film to me were two secondary characters. Dr. Gaul (Viola Davis) was delightfully evil. The Hunger Games were her baby. She was a very bad influence on Snow. She gave him a little of her blood lust and he catered to her power.

Dean Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) was my other favorite character. As Dean of the students who were mentors he was weary and tired of it all. But he offered helpful tips to Snow, who used them to cheat his way to a win for himself and Lucy Gray.

Snow himself suggested some of the things we saw later in the games. It was his idea that viewers could send money for their favorite competitor and it would be used to send things like water to them. Except the delivery drones were crap and merely crashed. That idea developed into something big later but it was a disaster here.

The games were held in a bare arena. They were brutal and rudimentary compared to what they became. Lucky Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman) was narrating it all for the television viewers.

Snow was punished for cheating. He was sent to District 2, but he convinced them to let him go to District 12 where Lucy Gray would be. His friend Plinth followed him there. He secretly connected with Lucy Gray.

District 12 is where Snow lost his moral bearings. He betrayed people, he murdered people, he lost his love. He completed his conversion to the horrible excuse for a human being that we hated so much in the other Hunger Games movies.

This movie was over two and a half hours long, but I didn’t feel like I knew much about any of the characters except Snow when it was over. Tom Blyth is similar enough to Donald Sutherland to make him a convincing younger version of Snow.

I would have loved to know more about Lucy Gray and some of the rebels in District 12. I didn’t care about the characters the way I did in the other Hunger Games movies. Which means I didn’t care about the entire movie with much affection or approval.

If you’re interested in this one, you can see it on Apple TV or Peacock. Let me know what you think if you watch it.