The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

The trailer for the new Hunger Games film uses tried and tested action music devices. Begin with minimalist piano in the high register, add tension using synth textures and industrial-sounding risers, sprinkle in choir and brass, synchronize the cinematic percussion to the violence on screen, et voilà! But, beneath the surface, this trailer features several subtle devices that link the listener’s ears to the preceding films in this series. Let’s take a listen.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set 64 years before the events of the four Hunger Games films we already know, and presents the story of young Coriolanus Snow and Lucy Gray Baird. Snow, from a down-on-their-luck prestigious family in the Capitol, is chosen as a mentor for Baird, a young musician from District 12 who is forced to fight to the death in the dystopic annual Hunger Games.

The trailer opens and closes with a musical throwback to the whistled code melody used between characters Katniss and Rue in the first Hunger Games film. This melody, accompanied by percussion accents, risers and a synth chord, is presented first in the 5 seconds of music for the micro-teaser at the start of this trailer, as we zoom out from a golden animated bird and snake with the film’s title card on top. This same throwback melody is then adapted a few seconds later, in the piano’s upper register, above ominous billowing synth textures.

At the countdown to the start of the Hunger Games, from 1.08-1.16 we hear a pre-recorded female voice over loudspeakers, repeated four times, instructing us calmly to ‘Enjoy the show’, spoken in the background as mundanely as the famous ‘Mind the gap’ instructions to London Underground passengers. Simultaneously, as the games begin we hear a countdown from five spoken by the television host, but when we are expecting to hear the word ‘one’, we instead see Snow whisper to Baird: “Run.” A clever rhyming replacement which helps kick off the ensuing deadly combat.

As part of this action sequence Snow is forced to join the military, and snare drum accents are added to the mix. From 1.48-1.50, the snare is cleverly synched with visuals of Snow slamming his hand onto a case, then firing his rifle into the treetops. Here, two drum accents are aligned note for note with each of the two fist slams in the first shot, but then as Snow fires over 10 quick rounds into the air, we hear just three accents from the drums. Even without any foley or sound design for the gunfire, the oral-visual link here is clear. It’s as though by first synching the case-slamming hit for hit, our minds fill in the blanks for the gunfire which follows immediately after.

In the final section of the trailer, the chords become more complex, more percussion and choir are added, then we cut to silence again at 2.30. The voiceover that follows is not the teenage Snow from this film but rather President Snow (played by Donald Sutherland) decades later, with his line from the film Mockingjay “It’s the things we love most that destroy us.”

We’re all but done at this point and the trailer's final two musical phrases have all the stops pulled, complete with percussion, brass, synths, choir, and bass risers. This then gives way to a solo electronic tone giving us a reprise of Rue’s four note motif from the first film.

The Hunger Games story continues, in theatres, November 17th.

— Jack Hui Litster