Snow White

This weekend, Snow White, the newest Disney live-action remake, was released in theaters. The movie is a remake of the 1937 classic film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and follows Snow White as she flees from her kingdom after her evil stepmother tries to kill her. This movie had a troubled production from the story. From the star's comments about the film to the backlash of rumored story changes, I'm not sure this movie ever had a chance to be good but I at least wanted to give it a go with slight optimism.

While this movie is not nearly as bad as people are making it out to be, it is not a good movie. There are a few redeeming qualities. Regardless of your opinions of Rachel Zeigler and her misguided comments, she is a very good performer and makes the musical moments at least watchable. She has the background of being a musical star and she brings this to the songs in this movie. I also thought that the story of Snow White was surprisingly coherent for the amount of reshoots they had to do. You can kind of tell where the reshoots were but it isn't as obvious as other movies I have seen (Captain America: Brave New World).

Unfortunately, the movie is a largely misguided attempt at remaking a classic film. Gal Gadot was not a good choice to play the evil Queen. Her performance is over the top and cheesy and just does not fit with the rest of the film. The movie, for some bizarre reason, decides to use CGI dwarves instead of casting real actors. Not only do the dwarves look terrible but they also eliminate roles that could have gone to real people with dwarfism. I know they said they were trying to eliminate stereotypes but I'm not sure CGI dwarves was the way to go. Snow White also has some big tonal issues. The movie goes from a goofy tone with Snow White and the dwarves singing whistles while you work to a super dark tone with Snow White and some bandits getting hunted and shot at by soldiers. The biggest issue is that the movie just loses the essence of the original film. They get rid of the prince and try to make a more politically correct film than the original film. The people that want to watch this movie are going to be the ones that love the original. If you deter too much from that, people are going to get upset which is what happens. Because of people getting upset, Disney decided to do damage control with a bunch of reshoots. I'm pretty sure the dwarves were added in reshoots as there were both 7 bandits and 7 dwarves with the bandits getting the axe in favor of the dwarves. The poison apple part and true love's kiss waking Snow White also seem like it was added because randomly it is just thrown into the middle of the film. They needed to just commit one way or the other from the get-go. Either do a faithful remake of the original or tell a new story but don't put a half effort into both.

Overall, this movie was more misguided than it was bad. They tried to fix it with reshoots but I think people were already too upset with the movie for it to have any chance of success.

Score: 5/10 Grade: C- Recommendation: Skip it