REVIEW: Snow White

Here's a story:

When developing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the hardest scenes to nail was the sequence in which the young princess is out in the meadow and she sees a lost bird who has been separated from its family. As she goes to console it, The Huntsman starts toward her, intent to fulfill The Evil Queen's orders to kill the princess and bring back her heart. The animators turned over every stone trying to figure out how to pull off this episode. They went back and forth about how slow he would creep up on her. When would he bring out the knife? When would the shadow fall on her? One of the animators reportedly asked at one point, "But won't she get hurt?"

That was the moment when Walt's team knew they had succeeded at their base directive to create pathos and integrity within the form of animation--to get audiences to care about a cartoon, such that they would worry that this tender-hearted girl was about to be killed.

In the 2025 remake by Marc Webb, that moment passes by without so much ceremony. There isn't even a bluebird for Snow White to console. No display of tenderness that makes you understand why The Huntsman would show compassion. The situation winds up becoming less defined by the tension of the moment than how he awkwardly came to have a knife in his hand before the princess scurries off. And that more or less tells you everything you need to know about how much thought was put into this film.

The ambition behind this remake seems to be to recast Snow White as a literal hero, the kind that actively overthrows evil power structures. This is not the unholiest of aims, and it's not as though Disney has failed to pull this off in other offerings.

But the source material of this film provides no natural footholds to carry the story to that destination. The Evil Queen of 1937 is less a violent despot oppressing the invisible masses who need liberating than a really bad step-parent with criminal eyeliner. And so this remake winds up having to craft entire plotlines out of whole cloth, like the bandit gang that may or may not have been intended to supplant the dwarfs in some buried draft. The bandits get about as much payoff as any of the other added elements, which only serve to clutter a story that has no sense of direction or unity. (There are also contradictions we could get into: Snow White here spends way more time talking about her father than animated Snow White ever did about her Prince.)

Credit to Zegler, she gives her all in whatever scene she's in, and the moments where the Princess shines through are the movie's best, but she doesn't know what movie she's in better than anyone else. She and love-interest, Andrew Burnap, seem at home with one another, but their storyline ends up choking on itself.

Snow White is reportedly the catalyst for getting the handsome Jonathan to understand selflessness and hope in times of distress, but this only brings up further questions: what are Jonathan and his bandit buddies doing risking their lives together like this if they really do believe in every man for himself? And what is Jonathan doing ribbing her for her spoiled upbringing anyway? Didn't he see her slaving away in her own castle? Right before she put herself on the line to save him from the dungeons?

It's Gal Gadot, though, who most actively derails the film. Maybe it just didn't fit the director's vision to have the antagonist match the steely coldness of The Evil Queen from the animated film, but surely there were other sources of inspiration than Ashley Tisdale as seen in High School Musical. The movie ends up ironically capturing the agony of living under the tyranny of a narcissist who's neither menacing nor even competent--just really shrill and somehow in charge.

There is also measure of valid irritation with this movie for calling itself a musical yet supplanting well over half of the original film's song book. (Seriously! Do these dum-dums not realize the entire demographic for these remakes is 30 year olds who want to sing-along in the theater?) Pasek & Paul are maybe the least frustrating components of the film, yet this is perhaps their weakest menu to date. Their strongest offerings are actually Snow White's new anthem and her love duet with her bandit boyfriend. I guess we can only imagine a universe where these story beats were supplied by music ... Maybe they could have redirected their efforts to something like the Evil Queen's diva number, featuring such sizzling lyrics as "Beauty means power, means I write the rules" that would surely make Howard Ashman jealous ...

Some will look at this and muse themselves on how fruitless it ever was to try to resuscitate a nearly hundred-year-old cartoon for a world that tells itself it's beyond fairy-tales, and I'd have to disagree. "Timeless" is more than just a tagline. And America of the 2020s surely needs fairy-tales every bit as much as America of The Great Depression did.

But that only works if a film has a vision for what it wants--and this film only knows what it doesn't want.

--The Professor

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