Snow White’ Review: There’s No Magic in This Dull Remake

After months of online talk and controversy, Disney’s ‘Snow White’ has finally arrived in theatres, and we get to see if it’s really all that bad.

The story follows Snow White, a young princess who’s had her throne stolen by her evil stepmother, who tires to kill her, but she escapes into the forest where she meets with seven dwarfs and a bandit gang, and starts to form a plan to get her kingdom back, free her people, and become the ruler her father always intended her to be.

This movie has had everything working against it right from the start. Whether it’s actors damaging the film before it’s even released, giving embarrassing interviews on the red carpet, or online controversy over leaked plot details and apparent changes angering fans of the original, everything that could go wrong did, and created a PR nightmare for Disney. But now the movie is finally out, and we can see for ourselves whether any of it was justified.

The movie starts off well enough, filling in some backstory for Snow White, showing her as a child before her parents died, when she, and the whole kingdom was happy, before her stepmother made her into a serving girl, stole the throne, and began her iron rule.

I was getting along well with the first few minutes of the film. It was nothing special, but it wasn’t notably terrible either. Sure, there were some obvious changes from the original, but nothing that harmed the film. Then it all went wrong.

In fact, there’s almost an exact moment where a switch is flipped and the whole movie changes. The first time Snow White ventures outside of the castle, when the huntsman takes her to be killed, the look of the film takes on the strange yellow saturation that’s so striking in all the promotional material, and it’s no better on the big screen.

From here, everything starts to fall apart, and there’s no saving it. I don’t know how much of this was filmed on real sets, but the forest looks like it was built on a soundstage, and not a particularly big one. There’s something off about it, like everything, it’s supposed to be magical and enchanting, but just looks unnatural, as do all the animals, which are supposed to be cute, but look more like they’ve come from the inevitable low-budget horror flick that will happen once the original movie enters the public domain, and that’s before we get to the dwarfs.

The dwarfs. These are so egregious it’s really the strangest decision by Disney not to cast little people in the roles. Every time these seven horrors appear on screen they take you right out of the movie (and it’s not like you’re that immersed to begin with), they can’t be taken seriously, and any attempt to make them emote like humans just makes them even more uncanny and terrifying. None of this is helped by constant close-ups and giving Dopey far too many emotional scenes.

I really don’t get what they were trying to do with Dopey. In the original movie, the other dwarfs laugh at Dopey’s failures, but he always takes it in good humor, here it actually upsets him, which makes the other dwarfs seem cruel and leads to this strange attempt at making some sort of arc for him where he learns to speak, which make no sense.

Yet for all their onscreen presence, the dwarfs are completely irrelevant to the story, and do nothing of importance. As the title suggests, this isn’t ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, and they are just sidenotes to the rest of the story. This would have been a good thing if it has limited their screen time, but it doesn’t, and instead we get several extended scenes of slapstick physical comedy that fails to land.

Their reduction is probably to make room for the new plot, which involves Snow White falling for Jonathan, who isn’t a prince, but a Robin Hood type of bandit, who robs from the rich, and all that. Because the film has done something to flesh out the backstory of the evil queen, who is hoarding all the jewels in the kingdom while her people starve.

It’s understandable why the film would want to add more backstory here, but it’s all so perfunctory. The queen is evil in the extreme, so the only way for her to be defeated is for Snow White to lead an uprising. An uprising that succeeds because she remembered the names of a few of her subjects, and the queen breaks her mirror, after seeming to forget she’s magic and could probably just zap anyone who challenged her into dust.

There are so many contrivances and conveniences that it makes me wonder if these were last-minute additions made during reshoots, or cut up in editing after poor audience reception? After all, so many of the things that were hinted at in interviews with Rachel Zegler don’t seem to have happened. There’s still a love story, even if the prince is now a bandit, and it still follows more or less the same structure as the original. Was the bandit plot the original story and the seven dwarfs later additions, or the other way around? Because whichever way you look at it, both these plots can’t be reconciled into one.

Really though, the film’s biggest failure is that it’s boring, which is certain death for a family film. None of the new songs are memorable and feel crammed in, and it feels slow, despite a sub-two-hour runtime. I can’t see parents making their children sit through this once word gets out. Despite all the extra bits added in, it somehow feels emptier than the 1937 version.

I will say that the performances are good, at least what performances there are. The dwarfs can’t be counted, and there are few important characters besides Snow, Jonathan, and the queen. Despite everything, Rachel Zegler is actually good as the title character, and certainly has the singing voice. In fact, she could be considered the standout of the movie. 

Gal Gadot gives a good performance as the evil queen, with the deliciously evil, campy performance you want from a Disney villain, and thankfully there’s no attempts to redeem her or provide a tragic background. She’s evil and she’s proud of it!

In every other way, though, ‘Snow White’ is a complete failure. It’s completely devoid of magic, inspiration or life. The only good parts are two song and dance numbers using ‘Heigh-Ho’ and ‘Whistle While You Work’ as their base. It’s sad that after 90 years, Disney couldn’t come up with better than this as a way to honor the film that started it all. In every way, the 1937 movie is the better, and there’s no “holds up well” about it; one-to-one, it wins every time and is still the fairest of them all.