- SNOW WHITE (2025)
- Starring: Rachel Ziegler and Gal Gadot
- Directed by: Marc Webb
- Rated: PG
- Running time: 1 hr 49 mins
- Walt Disney
Our score: 2.5 out of 5
It’s finally here. We’ve been beat over the head for the past year about the updated version of “Snow White” which was going to change everything you thought you knew about the story. Of course there will be dwarves. Oops, no, sorry, we’re going to have “magical creatures” of all sizes and genders. Oops, sorry again. The dwarves are back.
And it didn’t help that the actress playing Snow White told the press:
“I just mean that it’s no longer 1937, and we absolutely wrote a “Snow White” that’s not gonna be saved by the prince, and she’s not gonna be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true. And so, it’s just a really incredible story for young people everywhere to see themselves in.”
These comments, and the whole yes/no dwarves controversy, put this film in the same category of “Twilight Zone: the Movie, where the death of actor Vic Morrow and two children overshadowed the actual film when it was released. Sometimes controversy pays off. Sometimes, it doesn’t.
In a land far, far away, the king and his wife are traveling in a blizzard when the queen gives birth. Since the child was born during a snow storm, she is given the name Snow White. (sigh) That’s like saying Batman took his name from the fact that he liked to play baseball. The new family spend their days wandering the kingdom, meeting and helping out their subjects. Sadly, the queen passes away and the king, lonely for female companionship, the king takes a new bride (Gadot in all of her epic wickedness), a woman whose vanity forces her to constantly question her magic mirror as to her status as the most beautiful, or fairest, of them all. She gives young Snow White (Emilia Faucher) a really bad haircut and keeps her locked in the castle, forced to do menial chores. While scrubbing the floor one day, a now adult Snow White (Ziegler) is surprised by Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), a sort of Robin Hood-like figure who came to rob the castle. He is captured but Snow White, with her heart of gold, helps him escape. This makes the queen angry. Very angry! She orders her huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and cut out her heart (this film is particularly dark for a PG rating). He lets her go, she finds the dwarves, the end. Not exactly, but that’s what it felt like.
Where to start? This is pretty much “Snow White” the way we remember it, meaning someone at Disney must have realized that the recent trend of failing films needed to stop and persuaded the filmmakers to be as familiar as possible. Ziegler was so good in Steven Spielberg’s updated “West Side Story,” but for whatever reason she doesn’t bring the slight vulnerability needed for the role she showed in “WSS” here. Sadly she doesn’t make Snow White likable, so you don’t really care what happens to her. Also, apparently Ziegler was directed to never blink and her constant, wide eyed stare is pretty unnerving at times.
It is good to see the familiar seven dwarves, even CGI ones, and the film picks up every time they are on screen. The film turns the “magical beings” into Jonathan’s band of men, who spend a lot of time singing and dancing. “You and Finch are such good dancers,” Snow White tells one of them. He replies that they’re “just good friends.” “If you say so.” Ha-ha.
The songs are ok and the CGI clever, but unfortunately you go into this film looking for the worst and, even though it’s not a bad as it could have been, it may take you a couple of viewings before you find the story you were hoping for. I’ll never know. One time was plenty for me.
On a scale of zero to five I give “Snow White” ★★ ½.