by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap
Intro:
It isn’t great, it isn’t terrible, it’s just… fair.
The most talked-about Disney movie in years… for all the wrong reasons. Said reasons will not be repeated here, because culture war buffoonery is the single dullest aspect of film discourse. However, much like what happened with Don’t Worry Darling in 2022, the mushroom cloud of a conversation around this incredibly mid film is inevitably going to overshadow the film itself.
The original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has earned its historical importance, and pretty much every animated work that came after owes it plenty, but even without getting into the antiquated characterisation, Snow White is the weakest part of the movie half-named after her. Compared to the Uncanny Valley primitivity of the rotoscoping and that dentist drill of a singing voice, Rachel Zegler is a commanding presence. She does justice to the original songs, which have been altered in gratifying ways (more Heigh-Ho, less Silly Song), as well as Pasek & Paul’s new additions. To say nothing of her opposite Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, where their real-world frictions bleed through into a convincing loathing between their characters (along with some potentially unintentional geopolitical messaging). Gadot is clearly having all the fun in the role, attempts at Auto-Tune salvaging notwithstanding.
While some of the changes of the original show forethought from writer Erin Cressida Wilson (along with the numerous Additional Literary Material credits), the production overall includes some downright strange creative decisions.
Snow White’s doll hair, for a start.
Making the titular Dwarfs CGI (looking like a mild upgrade on the dead eyes in Zemeckis’ mo-cap features) but also casting a live-action little actor for the not-Prince Jonathan’s band of merry men… and then never addressing it.
Set design that ranges from wood-passing-for-metal, Evil Dead woodland imagery, and a distracting number of owl carvings in the Dwarfs’ home.
Extending ‘Heigh-Ho’ to introduce all the Dwarfs by name, only to re-introduce them all by name again in the very next scene.
A new ending that threatens to enter Snow White and the Huntsman territory, but then buckles because we can’t have the woman lead be too proactive.
It doesn’t help that Huntsman isn’t the only work being cribbed from here, as this return to Disney’s theatrical come-up appears to have been translated as ‘let’s revisit everything’.
Snow White’s new love interest is basically a discount Robin Hood, their relationship supposedly the foundation for a major societal shift, a mere echo of what the Little Mermaid remake did less than two years ago, and there’s more than a little Maleficent in Gal Gadot’s performance style.
With all the new bells and whistles, it’s shifted from the not-enough-plot issue of the original into having too much, while also failing to properly focus on what it seemingly wants to say about fair rule and respecting nature (likely a result of all the reshoots).
Snow White is fair, and not in the way it keeps singing about. Despite its decent retooling of the story and the agency of its characters, and Rachel Zegler making the absolute most of her screen time (once again being far greater than the production around her), it fails to elicit a reaction any stronger than “huh, that’s kind of different”. It lacks the charm of the animated original, or the gumption of darker live-action visions like Fairest of Them All or A Tale of Terror, or the visual pedigree of Mirror Mirror, or even the incredulity of The Huntsman: Winter’s War. It isn’t great, it isn’t terrible, it’s just… fair.
