REVIEW: Bland and lifeless, 'Snow White' is a remake in need of magic

Following the passing of her parents, Snow White’s stepmother steps in as the Evil Queen. Cruel and vain, the Evil Queen locks Snow White in the castle as a servant, and their once-prosperous kingdom falls into ruin. Somehow, it is only when Snow White encounters the roguish Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) trying to steal food that she realizes the state of her people. Realizing the princess poses an emerging threat, the Evil Queen sets out to eliminate her, only for Snow White to escape and find refuge with seven magical forest-dwellers. As tensions rise, Snow White, Jonathan, and all of their followers will take a stand in the battle for the kingdom’s soul.

As far as reframing a classic story for modern sensibilities goes, Snow White features one of the clunkiest attempts in recent memory. While the entire plotline of a 14-year-old princess wishing for a prince to “rescue” her from a life of servitude was badly in need of updating, one wonders if turning her into a rebel leader was the right choice. Granted, Snow White and the Huntsman did much the same in 2012, with an armor-clad Kristen Stewart literally leading an army into battle, Zegler’s portrayal is just wrong for this interpretation. Blessed in voice and petite in stature, the actor perfectly embodies the wide-eyed innocence from Walt Disney’s 1937 original that the filmmakers were clearly trying to steer away from. 

The identity crisis extends to the creative execution, with splashes of whimsy disproportionately applied to entirely the wrong areas—from the production’s drab color palette and underwhelming costumes to the cartoonish appearances of the dwarfs and assorted forest creatures, the overall direction is muddled, at best. Any concessions to realism are undermined by the need to incorporate 88-year-old iconography.

Story-wise, it’s cringe-worthy enough when Snow White’s mere arrival in town inspires spontaneous rebellion (despite the film literally saying earlier that they’d forgotten she existed), but it’s downright ludicrous when Jonathan says he’d forgotten what courage was until he met her. This isn’t to say that a character like Snow White couldn’t spark a resistance, but Zegler’s take is so blandly generic, it beggars belief. If nothing else, her “I want” song, the newly-composed, Waiting on a Wish, is well done, so at least that’s something.

To be fair to Zegler, in most versions of the fairy tale, Snow White isn’t the star of her own story—that honor always went to the dwarfs and the Evil Queen, whose 1937 depictions highlighted the power of animation more than pining for a man ever could. Sadly, the Evil Queen here is played by Gal Gadot, whose entire acting acumen is—at best—theoretical. Never as deliciously sinister as she’s clearly meant to be, it doesn’t help that she’s saddled with a campy, upbeat musical number that Gadot absolutely can’t pull off, further undermining her clear lack of menace. 

For anyone holding onto the fact that the classic seven dwarfs are included here, one need only look at their half-baked CGI, interchangeable faces, and undercooked characterizations to question if this was always meant to be so. Political correctness aside, the original dwarfs were triumphs of animated character design—even if you didn’t know their names, each could be identified by how they looked, sounded, and moved. Here, those characters are presented with Polar Express-levels of lifelessness, with six near-identical simulacrums going about the expected motions, alongside a Dopey (also Feldman) that’s somehow even more horrific.

For his part, Jonathan is a decent substitute for Prince Charming, who, admittedly, only ever existed for partaking in non-consensual duets and public displays of affection. Here, the character has been reimagined as a freedom fighter so dedicated to righting society’s wrongs, that he’s enlisted seven racially- and gender-diverse bandits to fight for his cause. Take from that what you will, as their inclusion adds nothing to the proceedings, and the narrative collapses from the weight of the filmmakers’ virtue signaling.

Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Hollywood’s first full-length animated feature, gleaned from years of producing short musical cartoons. The result was a film that raised the technical and storytelling bars so high, it basically invented a genre—it was a risk that paid off, to blockbuster and award-winning success. Ninety years later, the House of Mouse is so risk-averse, that it has spent the last decade cribbing off its past successes, releasing a deluge of remakes, sequels, and spinoffs, to diminishing returns. Even their last attempt at a somewhat original story, 2023’s Wish, was little more than an exercise in self-referential fluff that would have benefitted from a couple more rewrites.

If the studio that Walt Disney built is to survive its next century, it’ll need more than warmed-over takes on familiar stories to justify its existence. At the very least, new and original interpretations of classic material would be more than welcome. While Snow White won’t be the film that ends Hollywood’s nostalgia baiting (*cough* Moana 2 *cough*), one hopes that its lifeless, lackluster approach inspires someone to actually take some kind of a creative chance, moving forward.

At the very least, we can wish.