Snow White

• Directed by Marc Webb
• March 12, 2025 (Alcázar of Segovia) / March 21, 2025 (US)
• Based on the 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Disney and the 1812 fairytale Snow White by the Brothers Grimm

A princess that escapes assassination by her stepmother joins with Seven Dwarfs and a bandit leading a group of unemployed actors to reclaim her kingdom. Sounds like a winning combo there.

I do feel some movies should not be remade because they are perfect just as they are. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is amongst those movies. If you must, do not make it less than the original. This strips so much if not everything that has made the original enduring.

They took a classic story and made it worse by altering so much of what was done originally. They didn’t improve upon anything but decided to make a good versus evil story featuring true love into a message film about a young girl who wishes to grow up to be a benevolent dictator. Royalty of old was not much else.

Snow White is under two hours and feels like it’s well over two hours. There is to no sense of building towards anything. There is a vibe of the story moseying along and hoping that the memory of the original will boost what Marc Webb and pals have wrought. It abandons the original film’s themes of self-sacrifice and true love and replaces it with a distinct yet poorly delivered message that communism/socialism is awesome.

I had heard Snow White had its political leanings and did not hide them, but I was surprised at how quickly it showed its cards with the opening song of Good Things Grow. When you listen the opening song is discussing an idealized communist nation despite that history has taught us otherwise. The issue is it is not a good song. Not that they did any favors here to Heigh-Ho with the lyrical changes/additions.

Heigh-Ho is pretty much a cultural touchstone and intrinsically to Disney because of the classic film that really began the Disney empire. It takes some balls to rewrite a very simple yet very effective song. It takes a distinct lack of talent to completely make it worse somehow. None of the new songs nor the changes made to the classics are earworms like those that came before.

Originally as an act of kindness, Snow White helped the dwarfs mature a little bit and in return they repay that kindness by killing the Queen who is out to kill her. Now they just kind of give her a free place and clean their home at her direction while she sings. She engages in some mild burglary and proceeds to make whose home she entered her servants. Yikes! Nobody gave much thought to optics.

It doesn’t help that Rachel Zegler as Snow White is not good. When I went to school we often had to sit through theater productions put on by the high school students. She has all the same skill in her performance. Yet conversely her singing is good. She can actually carry a tune if not knock it out of the park. The girl can certainly sing but she needs to be able to act too.

I don’t reflexively hate Gal Gadot. She’s not a great actress, but she’s not terrible. ‘Serviceable’ might be a good description. The problem here is though she looks the part of the Queen, she certainly doesn’t have the gravitas to carry off the evil. You need somebody that can carry that larger than life aspect and feel like a threat. She is more like a rude b!tch despite ordering a killing and running a nation into the ground.

Snow White’s love interest Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) is about as interesting as tepid bath water. There is very little about him making him a very forgettable character. Burnap’s performance is straight from a teen drama and the character has no depth beyond the moment. I could buy him as her friend or maybe supporter, but I do not know when love blossomed and the character never shows in the film’s finale.

He and the thieves he runs around with don’t factor into much to the story. Their effect on events is almost nonexistent. His band of actor thieves is as inconsequential as a female character would be in the worst of the old Hollywood films. They are a little more than background filler or a boring videogame side quest.

For a movie that clearly leans to the political left, Snow White takes a very right leaning stance on taxes. Before this movie was released some set pictures were leaked that everyone assumed were either the actors playing the dwarfs or were actors standing in for the dwarves. Those set pictures were of the thieves that Jonathan is the leader of. They are mostly if not entirely out of work actors because taxation crippled their industry. The right has been saying taxation kills industries for years!

The dwarfs look strangely lifeless. Animatronics are less disturbing than these CGI nightmares. Dinklage’s comments when this movie was announced caused the studio to create these lifeless abominations rather than use living actors possibly assisted by some CGI. Dinklage not only hindered the careers of some actors but harmed this production.

Then there is the Apple Scene with the Queen as the old woman. A highlight of the original. The transformation in the animated feature the more I think about it was one of the best examples of animated horror for decades. A little creepy, a little unnerving and just visually mesmerizing. Here it is a flat Gal Gadot song with underwhelming makeup.

Rather than the Queen being defeated in a violent storm by falling to her death, she is defeated because Snow White knows a little bit about some of the castle guards and the evil Queen in a moment of rage breaks the magic mirror before turning to crumbling black glass. It’s rather underwhelming and anticlimactic. Somehow a simple kiss in the original was a better close to the story than the mirror and a song-and-dance number with the whole kingdom dressed in white. To quote Zegler: Weird!

The character of Snow White is somehow a very inspirational figure to everyone she comes in contact with. Maybe it’s the acting or the direction by Mark Webb but what she does is not very much. Jonathan after a particular moment likes that she fought beside his band of thieving actors. She just rode around on a horse and led the guards away. Kindness? How does an apple demonstrate a high level of kindness to change a person’s heart? The rest of the time she’s stating platitudes but not actually doing anything. 

Perhaps some of the issues came from re-shoots and added scenes, which were done after the initial delay of the film. I’m sure some of that was to fix issues with the film while others were done to just smooth out what leeks had revealed, and the public demonstrated they would not except. Maybe some was even to blunt the presence of Zegler herself who was proving antagonizing to the paying public. Own the movie you made rather than cave! 

That’s a problem. If you have a message to convey or are doing something that’s at the core of your movie and you decide after everything is all said you’re going to water it down, you’re going to make a bad movie. You can’t take most or all of the walls out of the interior of your house and expect the structure to still stand as strong as it once did.

With the distinct communist/socialist themes and the message of everybody working together despite the reality that the character of Snow White has to do everything herself and saves the day by herself, that completely undermines those messages. Are they saying that communism and socialism are great so long as there is a strong man (or woman) to make it all happen? What is this movie trying to say specifically? Where is it trying to come down?

Snow White really is as bad as they say. Perhaps more so. It’s flat and takes a nearly perfect story and makes it far less than what it was. Worse it’s boring. Skip!