Everyone is very pretty and very hungry in the new Hunger Games prequel trailer

And while the plot of the film is a bit hard to parse from the trailer—readers of Suzanne Collins’ 2020 source novel will presumably have a better grasp on all this—the basic principles of a Hunger Games movie are still clearly in play: Pretty youngsters killing each other for the delight of well-heeled monsters, with rebellion bubbling up at the edges. Our central characters this time are Lucy (Rachel Zegler), a tribute in the upcoming 10th games, and Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), a Capitol resident assigned as her mentor—and who is still decades away from transforming into a fascist-chic Donald Sutherland from the original films.

Meanwhile, the series sticks to another one of its core principles: Hiring damn fine performers to play the grown-ups in the room, with Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage as the architects of the current games. (Meanwhile, only Jason Schwartzman seems to be having any actual fun as Lucky Flickerman, a weatherman and “amateur magician” who serves as the film’s resident Stanley Tucci stand-in.) All the hallmarks are here, in other words: Pretty locations, pretty people, pretty little murders. (They even manage to work Rue’s four-note song right there in the ending.)

The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes—mouthful of a title, by the way—arrives in theaters on November 17.