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Born into royalty, Snow White (Rachel Zegler) loses her mother at a young age, and her father hastily remarries but soon goes missing. With nobody to stop her, the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) assumes the throne, leaving her subjects starving and destitute while turning Snow White into a scullery maid. The Evil Queen keeps Snow White imprisoned in the castle, but the kindly princess has a chance encounter with a thief, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who breaks into the castle to take food, and she helps him escape. Even though the Magic Mirror assuages the Evil Queen by naming her the "fairest one of all," Snow White's beauty eventually usurps her, angering the tyrannical ruler. The Evil Queen orders the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to kill Snow White, but he finds her beauty irresistible and instead urges her to flee into the forest. Snow White soon finds herself in a secluded cottage with seven diamond-mining dwarfs, and she reunites with Jonathan, who leads a group of bandits. While the Evil Queen tries to enact her plan to kill Snow White, the princess seeks to reclaim her kingdom and rule with fairness.
The world of Snow White looks plasticine and artificial, with a distracting digital gloss that constantly reminds us that nothing is real. Instead of being tactile and believable, the visuals look even more cartoonish than the original 1937 movie, and there is no interesting aesthetic stylisation to compensate for the cheap CGI slop that appears all over the screen. It is baffling that Disney started their live-action remake trend with Kenneth Branagh's excellent Cinderella - which was shot on 35mm film, looked real and featured cute, whimsical creatures - before moving backwards in terms of visual aesthetics.
There is no getting past the dreadful digital dwarfs here, which look like pure nightmare fuel. The decision to create digital dwarfs instead of casting actual actors is indefensible, and little people have every right to protest the production. The dwarfs here completely lack personality, making them utterly indistinguishable from one another. Plus, with the script shoving in a group of bandits to accompany the seven dwarfs, none of the ensemble make an impression. Popular cinematic myth has it that the movie's 12-month release date delay was to add the dwarfs, as the seven diverse bandits originally filled their roles in the story. This rumour seems plausible as there is no reason for the dwarfs and the bandits to coexist in this overcrowded ensemble. Heck, in 2012's Mirror Mirror, the characters referred to the dwarfs as bandits.
The 1937 film has a threadbare narrative that feels stretched thin despite its relatively short 80-minute runtime. This Snow White retains the same structure but beefs up the story to an interminable 109 minutes without adding anything meaningful or substantive. The first 15-20 minutes of this remake drag out the backstory that the animated movie covered in its first few minutes, and the exposition here feels like pure homework. The narrative does not organically flow from one event to the next, with the structure feeling messy and disorganised, a clear reflection of the extensive reshoots that occurred nearly two years after principal photography wrapped. Indeed, Snow White feels like a patchwork of ideas, halfheartedly incorporating recognisable beats from the original animated film without nailing the heart and soul of the original story. The songs were a big part of the 1937 picture, but the musical numbers in this Snow White amount to lifeless padding. The songs feel like the work of AI and autotune, and they never meaningfully advance the story or function as character development.
One must feel sorry for director Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer), who clearly relinquished all creative control to the Disney executives and merely serves as a puppet for their constantly changing, politically motivated desires. None of the dramatic scenes are engaging, there is no humanity to the story, and it is impossible to care about anything that happens. Gal Gadot is woefully miscast as the Evil Queen, sometimes rendering her dialogue unintentionally comical (she sometimes sounds like Scooby-Doo). Meanwhile, Rachel Zegler dials back the poisonous arrogance and obnoxiousness of her press appearances to play a noticeably bland take on Snow White. Zegler's performance lacks emotional depth and humanity, and she cannot portray believable fear when the Huntsman tries to kill her. The rest of the cast are outright forgettable, from the generic dwarf voices to an incredibly nondescript Andrew Burnap as Snow White's love interest who's named, um, Jonathan.
For a movie that spent nearly three years in post-production and expended enough money to feed and house the homeless for decades, there is no excuse for Snow White's vast shortcomings. The songs are forgettable and flat, the visuals are hideously off-putting, the acting is atrocious, the digital dwarfs and animals look phoney and nightmarish, and there is no sense of pace. Snow White is one of the most hated movies in internet history, obtaining an unimaginably poor IMDb rating (1.6/10 as of April 2025) and prompting scores of negative reviews and social media posts. Frankly, the film deserves everything it gets.
1.9/10
