Snow White Movie Review Rating:
Star Cast: Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap, and Jeremy Swift
Director: Marc Webb
What’s Good: Rachel Zegler proves the haters wrong with a solid performance, and we can only hope she comes out unscathed from this.
What’s Bad: Gal Gadot has run out of goodwill from the first Wonder Woman film, and her performance here is truly a horror to behold.
Loo Break: You know this story, and you have seen it hundreds of times before, so any moment is a good one to go to the loo and take a break.
Watch or Not?: This is a definitive pass; it is the worst of the Disney live-action films, and it is just a terrible way to start the blockbuster season for the year.
Language: English (with subtitles).
Available On: Theatrical release
Runtime: 109 Minutes.
User Rating:
The history of Disney’s live-action films has been a crazy roller-coaster, with some of the films managing to get 1 billion dollars at the box office and others simply fading into obscurity after their release in theaters. However, the tale of how Snow White became one of the most cursed films from Disney is just as interesting as any other. A film plagued with a hellish production that resulted in one of the worst films of the soon, quite a big box-office bomb.
Snow White Movie Review: Script Analysis
Disney’s Snow White is a very strange film as it isn’t interested in telling the classic story as we remember it in terms of execution, adding a lot of new songs to the mix. Still, none of them feel like they fit with the characters, the story, or the overall theme that the picture should have. It is there, while listening to the songs, that you might realize that the film is not what you expected but what the trailers showed: a film filled with bad CGI, terrible performances, and a sense of being relatively cheap.
The thing is that it wasn’t cheap. This version of Snow White was quite expensive after they decided to make the seven dwarfs using CGI, and this same lack of care can be felt in the script. Some fundamentals of the story have been changed to appeal to more “modern audiences,” and it just feels wrong and out of place. Snow White might be one of the most boring Disney princesses, but her modernization could have been so much better.
The same goes for the humor, which is very hit or miss, as most jokes land in the absurd to dumb territory that might work for some people but will definitely not work for most of them. The plot can be said to be almost the same. The bones are there, and because of it, you can find some entertainment in this. The Snow White tale is a classic for a reason, and that sense of familiarity will definitely push this one further than the actual execution of the film doing it for the film.
The script also has no sense of build-up, and many scenes feel disconnected from one another, to the point that the climax of the movie comes and goes so fast that you might not even feel it, and the film ends as if nothing of importance really happened in the last 30 minutes. The film has a sense of pace and structure that is truly bizarre, and it might be the result of the editing process where many things were cut, creating this incoherent mess.
Snow White Movie Review: Star Performance
The performances are very rough in Disney’s Snow White, and the worst offender is definitely Gal Gadot, who really comes across as someone without any sort of acting talent in her being. This development is very strange and makes it question why she was so charismatic in the first Wonder Woman and some of the Fast & Furious films. How could this be the same actress from those pictures? It is truly baffling, and on top of everything, she cannot sing either.
Rachel Zegler, who received most of the hate from audiences and media outlets before the film came out, is actually the best thing in the film. She is a competent actress, and her voice is just incredible. It is sad that most of the new songs don’t really hit the mark, but she is doing her best. Maybe in another version of the film, she could have lifted it up all by herself, but that is not the case in the final release.
Snow White Movie Review: Direction, Music
Another case of falling behind is Marc Webb, a director who has never been quite remarkable but who we never thought could actually stumble like this, especially after suffering from the backlash of the second Amazing Spider-Man film. You would think Webb would avoid all the same mistakes, but here we are in that same stage. The overall production of the picture is also quite cheap, at least it looks like that, but we know the film is expensive, very expensive.
There was a lack of care when it came to costume, makeup, and especially lighting, which is doing the most to make the film look bad. The CGI dwarfs are terrifying and might induce more nightmares than laughter when all is said and done. It is hard to watch a film that definitely had so much work put into it just to not do well in any regard.
Snow White Movie Review: The Last Word
This Snow White movie proves that Disney, as a company, has lost all sense of originality. Its quality assurance has been sleeping for quite some time, first with Star Wars, then Marvel, and now its live-action output. The company definitely needs a reset, a new start where it creates new classics instead of rehashing them over and over again. This is definitely not the way to success.
