A beautiful girl, Snow White, takes refuge in the forest in the house of seven dwarfs to hide from her stepmother, the wicked Queen. The Queen is jealous because she wants to be known as 'the faire...
Disney’s first animated feature, the first hand-drawn animated film and arguably Disney’s most important film “Snow White” was always bound to be rebooted at a certain point and receive the same extensive laundry list of valid complaints and controversies. As always with these remakes, it’s a convoluted guessing game to see which one does it right or right enough.
And this is yet another remake that is…..just there.
I appreciate Marc Webb trying to go for the Kenneth Branagh approach he did for Cinderella but unlike Kenneth, he strains a lot with the what and how’s. Sure, his direction doesn’t blatantly call attention to itself but it’s otherwise incongruous, feeling heavily uneasy in what obviously doesn’t feel like its own skin. For someone known for focusing on character-driven narratives and emotional authenticity, his attempts at renovation here don’t feel like an acquired taste.
I’m of two minds on the production design: obviously on surface leveling, it’s lush, lavish and easy on the eyes but fifty-fifty, half of these sets are either computer-generated gloss or an actual set on location clouded by whatever lens is chosen and that already makes it difficult for one to be immersed in this world…..which is what I would be saying if there was a world to be sucked into. There’s hints of a London West End show theatrical appeal to how its staged but they can illicit more imagination than this: it feels compromised, so small and barely offers insight into this supposed repurposed environment.
This presentation may not nakedly scream “rushed” but it does scream “strained” to a point of uncertainty. Take the tone for instance: visibly terrified to lean into corny cartooniness or double down on realism, they barely stitch together the best from one end and the worst from the other with no clear atmosphere to ground it. Pacing has a similar issue where its inability to mount proper momentum lingers on for long stretches, fluctuating the film’s tempo and energy despite the speed being manageable; just addled and imprecise. VFX meet the very definition of uncanny valley with the dwarves designs getting the brunt of criticism (even though they don’t look terrible to me), the costumes are either fancy, distracting and discordant with everything else with no in-between and Mandy Walker’s cinematography, while more proficient in recreating the classic framework of the original movie, at least avoids looking too basic and unobtrusive. High-key lighting and the typical dour color saturation doesn’t help much with those efforts though and the stilted editing flip-flops between making said images spiffy or mundane.
What shouldn’t be a big surprise here, but is, are the songs themselves: while the staging of each musical number can cheapen the actual song itself, they’re still pretty good. Both the score and original songs carry flairs of that nostalgic childlike whimsiness while the new ones embody a retrograde Disney Renaissance aura about them with an emphasis on catchy melodies and an inkling of emotional catharsis behind them. All of this does the bare minimum in justifying the 109 minute runtime than the repurposed story as a whole, however.
I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
Look, the acting is nothing short of decent all around: not everyone has the best chemistry with each other but you can tell most of them are trying with one noticeable exception: Gal Gadot is still terrible. Sure, she’s more expressive when she’s the old hag and her rather inauthentic performance matches Queen Grimhilde’s rather tacky and fake personality but her role gives her nothing to work with and vice versa. As for Rachel Zegler, she does struggle to balance both the old and new for this character but in comparison to everyone else, her passion and dedication tap-dances literal circles around them to where it’s not even funny.
The characters and dialogue they’re stuck with though….ehhh?
I slowly realize the more Disney remakes I watch, the more I’m reminded of the stark differences between emotional storytelling and literal storytelling, especially in animated features where you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief. This story flounders in trying to bridge both of those worlds together, though not for a lack of trying. On one hand, I understand the need for an update: given some of its more outdated intricacies and the original story being too skeletal to support this films more weightier, loftier goals, this was the closest thing to a blank slate for anyone to try and rework on to give it some complexity. There’s an actual plot this time that follows the aforementioned basic film structure and as flimsy its messages are set up and paid off, it still gets across the central idea that there’s more to beauty than just the exterior.
And hey, at least it’s still marginally better than Wish.
That being said, that original fable has been around for two full centuries and runs purely off imagination and vibes as a simpler childlike way of looking at the world. So recontextualizing all of that for a modern setting takes a lot of planning that Erin Cressida Wilson has trouble committing to. Similar to the Little Mermaid reboot, it’s death by a thousand cuts: they expand a little too much by trying to turn this into a Robin Hood-esque tale and the very commitment to give everything an explanation, no matter how thoughtful or superficial, leads to a botched duality that the narrative simply can’t shake. We’re watching two separate stories with two separate casts fighting for footing in a meandering structure with passable ideas that barely take flight and that crippling uncertainty also ties into the complete stagnation of all its characters, especially Snow White. It’s like everything’s stuck in limbo with hardly enough heart to push through to the finish line.
Hell, even if they did know what to do, how do you think they’d explain Dopey being mute reaching a conclusion designed to look ableist, the implications behind the mining business, hinting that Queen Grimhilde’s powers derive from her beauty, the total mystery behind what the bandits actually accomplish or Snow White’s Gandhi-like approach to the final confrontation (even if I do get the implications behind it)? And those are just the most obvious examples I can pinpoint; I won’t say they were totally ‘no thoughts, head empty’ for the entire experience but heavily nearsighted is what all of that looks like.
Seriously though, is it really surprising? This movie was doomed from the start, still trying in vain to please everyone but it was never going to because everyone had a different idea of what the heck it should be and no one’s gonna be satisfied either way.
Another fairly paint-by-numbers exercise in updating a quintessential but unquestionably quaint property for modern consumption, I can’t pretend Snow White doesn’t have its litany of endearing fluttering features but it also doesn’t erase the sheer magnitude of incongruities it caused for itself. Unfortunately, I think this apple’s rotten right to the core from all the things passed down from all the apples coming before.
