Apparently, this was the weekend to see movies aimed for younger audiences. I might have normally seen Snow White when it came out, but my girlfriend asked me to hold off in case her own trip to see it fell through, and then we could go together. Well, her own friend couldn’t go, so we went and, despite the fact she’s a big Disney fan, neither of us went in with high expectations. We’d heard about the critical and audience reactions. We went all the same.
I usually don’t like Disney’s live action remakes. Would Snow White be an exception?
As explained by the movie’s unseen (for most of the runtime) narrator, Snow White was born to a good and kind king and queen in the middle of a blizzard, hence her name. The king and queen taught Princess Snow to be good and kind to the people, and they even baked apple pies for feasts or something. However, after the queen dies of an unnamed illness, a beautiful woman (Gal Gadot) shows up. Feigning kindness, she gets the king to marry her, but then when the king disappears after going to see about a military expedition of some kind from a neighboring kingdom, the Evil Nameless Queen sets herself up as a dictator under the assumption that, as the fairest of them all, she deserves the power and wealth of the kingdom. Snow White (Rachel Zegler)is forced to work as a servant in her own parents’ castle, and everyone is miserable.
However, Snow White runs across a bandit (Andrew Burnap) robbing the pantry, and when Snow White suggests the Queen show mercy to the bandit, that doesn’t happen, so Snow White lets him go. From there, the Queen’s magic mirror (voice of Patrick Page) tells the Queen that Snow White is now the fairest of them all, so the Queen sends Snow White off with her huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to die. But Snow White causes the man to feel pity, so she runs away and, well, this is the Disney version, so that means the Seven Dwarfs show up not long after that, and that means the Queen still wants Snow White dead. Can Snow defeat her evil stepmother?
Let me start off by saying something I wasn’t expecting when I went in: the movie is not as bad as I had thought it would be, and my girlfriend felt the same way. Zegler is a fine Snow White, and her singing voice is great. Gadot may have a limited range, but she does play a good campy villain here. The movie does fall into the same trap as almost every other Disney live-action remake in that it tries to fill in plot points that no one really cared about before. The original animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is roughly a half-hour shorter, but it’s a simple enough story. This one tries to flesh out Snow White, the Prince (Jonathan the bandit chief here), and the kingdom itself. Is that necessary? Maybe, maybe not, but this isn’t the first time I have seen a remake do that. But I will say there’s a lot here that works to one degree or another. The Queen’s transformation from her usual appearance to the old woman who gives Snow White the poison apple is actually pretty good, and given the purported budget of the movie, I’d say it shows with things like the CGI animals and dwarfs, the choreography, the set design, and a whole host of other things, I’d say the budget shows in the movie.
The problem with Snow White is a basic one: it’s too crowded. Sure, it tries to give personality to the characters–arguably only the Dwarfs in the original had any personalities of their own–but then it adds more characters like Jonathan’s bandit squad, and I don’t think all of them even got the chance to speak any lines. The central ideas here are basic ones, good for kids, but for adults, it might be noted that the old songs, reworked here, and the new ones don’t quite work together. The old songs used are classics, remembered for a reason, but the new ones were clearly not written by the same songwriters. There’s a point, late in the movie, when something literally falling from the sky knocked me out of the movie. My girlfriend did spend a lot of time laughing at the antics of the animal and dwarf characters, as did a man sitting on my other side, and I have seen worse, but really, this movie was overstuffed. I know it’s fashionable in some circles to blame Zegler for the movie’s lack of success, but she wasn’t the problem here. No, this is just another attempt by Disney to remake one of their own classics. It mixes and matches new material and plot points from the original animated feature and new material written decades later. I think the movie would have done better had it just started the whole thing over from scratch, but the end result is, well, another unnecessary Disney remake, but hardly the worst I have ever seen of the lot of them.
Grade: C+
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