The world of “The Hunger Games” comes rushing back to you — well, sauntering back to you — not that long into “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”

It’s been eight years since the “original trilogy” wrapped up with its fourth film, so we need that tre-immersion in all things Panem, the song of the Mockingjay and what not.

Let’s have a prequel that sets up the earlier film adaptations of Suzanne Collins’ violent, sexless Young Adult Fiction sci-fi allegories. Jennifer Lawrence is long gone, riding on to Oscar-winning glory. Josh Hutcherson’s just renewed his blockbuster license with “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”

But “Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” has beautiful new leads, big and broad replacements for the villains and the master of ceremonies, and all those Hogwarts-nonsensical names, fanciful critters, pages of endless clumsy exposition and movies that never ever ever come close to a graceful end.

Still beloved by the fans? We’ll see.

No tolerable climax is complete without a clock-watching anti-climax that so stretches things out that you start to discount the fabulous production design, the pointed parable about America’s rural vs. urban schism and how much fun Jason Schwartzman, in the Elizabeth Banks role, is having with all this.

At least the singing takes a giant leap forward. Casting “West Side Story’s” Rachel Zegler as heroine Lucy Gray Baird, a sort of Appalachian blues chanteuse with fire in her eyes and resistance in her heart, pays dividends as her performance and her character remind us of the role “protest songs” have played in our culture and its many labor, civil rights and anti-war movements before, during and after the American Century.

But this prequel franchise isn’t really about Lucy. It’s about the young idealist city boy who’d grow up to be Donald Sutherland as his most sinister. Young Brit Tom Blyth makes the maturing Coriolanus Snow hard to snuggle up to from the start, even as we’re supposed to see him journey from empathetic child of war and genteel poverty into a version of Shakespeare’s Roman Coriolanus, a man of achievement whose cruel, classist prejudices do him no favors in his quest for power.

A post-apocalyptic war prologue briefly establishes the struggle the very young Coriolanus, son of a military insider, and his older cousin Tigris went through to survive. Years later, he’s in The Academy, she (Hunter Schafer) and their Grandma’am (grande dame Fionnula Flanagan) live in urban poverty, hoping against hope that he’ll win the big cash prize for the best student there.

But the parameters of the prize have been changed to try and juice the sagging ratings of The State’s ten-year TV “Hunger Games” experiment. If Coriolanus wants that cash, that prize and his family to transition back to inside-the-halls-of-power status, he’ll have to mentor a Hunger Games contestant to victory.

As the “tribute” players seized from the assorted “districts” are assigned randomly, and he’s in an Academy class packed with strivers just as cunning as him, with a few compassionate exceptions, that’s going to be a long shot.

Giving him the dainty singing spitfire Lucy Gray to mentor into surviving the dog-eat-dog bloodsport of The Arena makes that seem impossible. There are cutthroats, born murderers and guys big enough to get drafted into the NFL, if that “Hunger Game” was still around. How’s this over-dressed (an embroidered corset over a layered chiffon skirt), perfectly made-up singer/songwriter stand a chance?

Coriolanus will have to manipulate the game — overseen by its creator, Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, looking thrilled to be here) — and the TV audience, making them fall for this rebel Vanessa Hudgens from the Districts, to stand a chance.

Collins and the screenwriters adapting her stick to formula with this book and this film. As in the original “Games,” there’s one main villain and one distinct heavy for this installment. The MC, “Lucky Flickerman,” a “weather man, reporter and host of these Hunger Games,” played by Jason Schwartzman, is the hilarious comic relief.

He always introduces himself as “a man who needs no introduction.” Ahem.

The annual “Games” in these films are always bloody, pitilessly violent and often render the MPAA’s PG-13 rating laughable. This version is even bloodier

Viola Davis is positively venmous as Dr. Volumnia Gaul, the defense dept. chief and inventor of biological terror weapons (snakes, etc) to keep the provincial “districts” in line.

“What are the Hunger Games for,” Dr. Gaul growls at promising young Coriolanus? That’s as close to “What’s this all about” as the franchise gets.

Blyth’s playing of Coriolanus seemingly sees into the future. The way this “works” is that we watch his “saveable” character’s corruption by life, love and the world he’s growing up in. That’s how story arcs work. But even in his softer moments, Blyth’s playing of this guy seems mercenary.

Whatever sparks we’re supposed to pick up on between the leads must have been saved for the sequels. But the reason “Hunger” author Collins isn’t facing book-banning is the loveless/sexless nature of her books, her penchant for violence and her apparent sympathy for rural grievance against “city” sophistication.

Everybody here is hired to wear the costumes, put on the makeup, look menacing and service “the games.” But for most of the players, their chief task is conveying mountains of exposition — explaining this world, its rules, history, hierarchy, etc. That was terribly tedious all the way through the original films, and it can be maddening here.

Whatever the virtues of the books, a stupid amount of time wasted on the arcana of the ever-evolving “rules” and shape of the games, too much of it delivered by poor Peter D.’s character. Dean Highbottom (cough cough) keeps telling Coriolanus that his father “was my best friend,” even as he does all he can to subvert Coriolanus, his efforts to save his fetching “tribute” mentee, “win” the Plinth Prize and ascend in status and power.

For all the explaining this movie does, why the son of his “best friend” does that never made it to the screen.

The violence is often shocking, and usually meted out to characters we’ve only just met and barely had a time to hear their silly multi-syllabic names more than once.

Lysistrata Vickers, Vipsania Sickle and Hilarius Heavensbee, we hardly knew ye.

Director Francis Lawrence, who ushered the Jennifer Lawrence “Games” off the stage, keeps the trains running and the depictions of the fascist designed city and sometimes impoverished, often Edenic countryside measured out.

But keeping track of all the characters, making us empathize for anybody who dies and root against anyone who deserves it becomes a challenge as the movie seems both dawdling and rushed, and never develops — for more than a scene or two — narrative momentum.

Some of that’s attributable to the fact that we keep pausing for a plaintive and moving bit of protest singer-songwriting from Zegler’s Lucy Gray.

Yes, those are the emotional and politically pointed highlights of “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” But they stop an already lumbering, over “explaining” narrative in its tracks every time she tunes up.

Rating: PG-13 (Strong Violent Content|Disturbing Material)

Cast: Tom Blythe, Rachel Zegler, Jason Schwartzman, Josh Andrés Rivera, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis.

Credits: Directed by Francis Lawrence, scripted by  Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:37