‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ didn’t need that President Snow voiceover

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ends with a foreboding promise.

We watch as Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) performs a victory tour of sorts, having just arrived back in the Capitol from District 12. He secures a swanky new gamemaker position with Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), poisons his enemy Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), and reclaims his family home. In the film’s last moments, he gazes up at a gleaming Capitol statue in determination, as if he’s already sizing up the presidency of Panem.

In that one glance, the message is clear: Snow may have landed on top, but in doing so, he’s become the monster who will terrorize the districts for years to come. It’s a chilling reminder of what’s next for Panem, and an effective ending for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

And then the film goes and undermines all of that.

As the screen fades to black, we hear a familiar voice speaking some familiar words. Donald Sutherland, the original President Snow, returns in voiceover, saying, “It’s the things we love most that destroy us.” Cue a massive eye roll from me.

There are several things wrong with this closing moment, the first being that this voiceover simply isn’t necessary. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes spends its entire runtime focused on a young President Snow, so why hastily shoehorn in Sutherland’s version in the film’s last seconds? This is the kind of behavior I’d expect to see in a trailer to tease who Snow will become, but not from the theatrical release itself. And guess what? This quote does, in fact, close out the film’s first trailer, making its inclusion here feel all the more redundant. (According to an Entertainment Weekly interview with director Francis Lawrence, the use of the quote in the trailer led to him using it in the film.)

The voiceover feels like a desperate attempt to remind us that The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes place in the same world as The Hunger Games, even though it’s impossible to think otherwise. Even if you forget the actual Hunger Games and Capitol of it all, we’re still following characters whose Hunger Games futures we know, like Coriolanus and his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer). We also learn the origins of several franchise staples, like the mockingjays and the “Hanging Tree” song. Sure, some of the references lean toward awkward fan service, like Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) explaining what the plant katniss is. But even that doesn’t compare to getting bludgeoned over the head by a quote lifted directly from Mockingjay: Part I.

Scratch that, it’s not just the quote. It’s the exact audio ripped from a scene between Katniss and Snow. That audio feels wildly out of place in the context of the rest of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which is itself aesthetically distinct from the other Hunger Games films. Lawrence has crafted a retrofuturistic vision of Panem’s past that carries seeds of what this world will become, but that can also stand on its own if necessary. Snow’s surprise voiceover shatters that, forcing more connective tissue between all the Hunger Games films that we simply did not need. Think about how underwhelming it would have been had Suzanne Collins changed the final line of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes from “Snow lands on top” to “Snow lands on top… until Katniss Everdeen came to knock him down.” That’s basically what’s happening here, only in movie form.

Even thematically, the inclusion is clunky. The quote, originally about Katniss and Peeta, does speak to Coriolanus’ own ill-fated love for Lucy Gray. He may believe that his love for her nearly destroyed him by getting him disgraced and exiled after the Hunger Games. But in reality, it’s his decision to turn on her and his friend Sejanus (Josh Andrés Rivera) that sends him down a darker path. He may not believe that path to be one of destruction, given that it offers him more power, but the people of Panem will suffer as a result.

The thing is, we get a strong understanding of all of that from The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ final moments — even without the voiceover! Up until Sutherland comes in, there’s a strong sense of dread for what Snow’s future holds, and what pain he will wreak on the nation. But as soon as we hear that quote, we’re left with a sinking feeling that The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes doesn’t trust us to draw connections between itself and the other Hunger Games films. That, and we’ve been played for nostalgia bait.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is now in theaters.