“Snow White” Review

While “Snow White” is fairly dull and unnecessary film, Rachel Ziegler’s performance as the tulip princess is one of the film’s few saving graces.

Despite the multitudes of whiny prerelease social media posts plaguing this film and its many controversies, I went into Disney’s live-action remake of “Snow White” in complete good faith despite my long-standing feud with Disney’s slate of live-action remakes of their animated classics. How many times can I say the same things? They feel uninspired. They lack surprises. Whenever they try to correct issues from the original, they wind up making things worse. Most egregiously, none of them are as good as or better than the original. 

While I have mildly enjoyed a few of these films like “Peter Pan & Wendy” and “The Little Mermaid” and I’ve also found joy in the punk-rock-like reimagining of “Cruella”, most of these films have just felt like painful retreads of films that didn’t have to be so shoddily resurrected. I didn’t even go see the prequel film “Mufasa” because of how much the 2019 version of “The Lion King” hurt me. Nevertheless, most of these films are made by talented people and there was something about “Snow White” that just made me go to the cinema to see if there is anything salvageable in these remakes. As expected, this film fails to live up to the majesty of the original 1937 classic but I don’t think it’s the worst of these remakes. “Snow White” still falls flat as an entertaining family film but there are a few elements that felt wondrous enough to view on their own, independent from the film itself. It’s not an endorsement of this film by any means but it manages to clear a few bars that other remakes can’t even manage to leap.

Like in the original film, Snow White (Rachel Zegler) is a princess who lives under the tyrannical rule of her stepmother the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) whose vanity is unparalleled. Then the Queen’s magic mirror proclaims Snow White to be “the fairest of them all”, the Queen wishes to have her killed. Fleeing this fate, Snow White meets seven magical dwarves in the forest and together, along with a gang of bandits, they try to both avoid the Queen’s wrath and take back the kingdom. 

In the essence of fairness, I do wish to bring up what I liked about this film. First of all, I think Rachel Zegler does a fair job with the material she is given. There are quite a few scenes where Snow White’s kindness and sincerity really shine through and Zegler always is on-point with her delivery. If you’ve seen her performances in “West Side Story” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes”, it’s no surprise that her singing voice is fantastic and any musical sequence that she’s a part of is welcome. Despite the digital effects on the dwarves, which are computer-generated with motion-capture, feeling off-putting at times (perhaps more depending on your comfort with the uncanny valley in digital effects), I found that Zegler brought some of that Disney magic to the classic song “Whistle While You Work”. Before the song even starts, there’s a short scene between Snow White and Dopey that is not only well-written and acted but that I actually wish was in the original film. For all of Disney’s massive, pointless changes in their remakes, I find that it’s the little tweaks that have actually done more to improve these classic stories. 

But the moments of gold are very few with the rest of “Snow White” being a dull affair that feels like an eternity, being a half hour longer than the original. While she has proven her talents in big franchises like the DC Extended Universe and The Fast and Furious films, Gal Gadot feels horribly miscast in her role as the Evil Queen. She has the physical prowess down but it always feels like a performance whenever she speaks. The original Queen had a very simple motive but you always felt the power and the wrath in every word she said. Gadot’s performance feels subdued in all the wrong ways, never coming across as an intimidating foe. 

Much like Guy Ritchie’s direction on the “Aladdin” remake or Robert Zemickis with “Pinnochio”, Marc Webb feels like he’s being flown on auto-pilot with this film. Webb is a very capable filmmaker who has made some excellent films like “(500) Days of Summer”, “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Gifted” but “Snow White” feels like another case of a film made by committee with themes being pinned on the director, much like how Webb was treated during the making of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”. 

Overstuffed is a good word to describe “Snow White” since there are too many pointless elements to count with the biggest offender being a gang of seven bandits that team up with the seven dwarfs to protect Snow White. While their leader Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) is a decent enough replacement for The Prince of the original film, these characters leave very little impact and take away from the cast that “Snow White” is trying to make interesting. The new songs feel tacked on with none of them, with the exception of “Waiting on a Wish”, making any sort of impact. It’s a shame since the songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have been responsible for some amazing music for film and theater including the lyrics for the songs of “La La Land” and the songs of “The Greatest Showman” and “Dear Evan Hansen”. 

What’s all the more comical is how much “Snow White” clearly wants to be animated with the animals, the magic mirror and the dwarfs all being created with computer technology. It’s as if halfway through the production, everyone associated with the film realized they had made a mistake trying to remake the original and had to choose between closing production or animating half the picture. 

I could go into greater detail about why this film didn’t work but, ultimately, the film never had a chance. As much as the other remakes have angered me, there was something that felt dirty to me about remaking “Snow white and the Seven Dwarfs”. Not only was it the first feature-length animated film and not only did it catapult the name of Disney into legend, even getting an especially ornate honorary Academy Award, but it is a masterpiece of film. While a few elements of the film do show their age, a critic that I follow closely named Doug Walker has praised the film as a masterclass of emotional storytelling and I’m in full agreement with him. Is it logical for Snow White to ride into the sunset with The Prince at the end of the film even though they only shared one scene together at the film’s beginning? Not really. But it works because the film is presented as an old-fashioned fairy tale where your emotions want to see this conclusion. 

I had the pleasure of seeing a beautiful 35mm print of the original film in a theater a few years ago and the emotional impact the film had on me was incredibly pronounced. “Snow White” and the Seven Dwarfs” still has moments that make me cry all of these years later and that will forever stay with me. This remake has none of that which immediately disqualifies it from having merit as both an adaptation and a stand-alone film. While I admit that I enjoyed watching “Snow White” more than I thought I would, I still found the experience dull and I seriously doubt it will be beloved by children and adults, especially when comparing it to its predecessor. 

I suppose I should be grateful that this isn’t the worst of the Disney remakes but I think we can and should get better from this remarkable studio that has changed the face of cinema time and time again. I am not even sure if I’ll see the “Lilo and Stitch” remake and I still feel unclean knowing that a “Moana” remake is on the horizon even though the original isn’t even a decade old yet. It wouldn’t shock me if we start remaking these remakes but that’s a paradoxical world that I hope we can stave off for a while longer.