Snow White ***

REVIEW:

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Don’t believe the hype. The new Disney live action Snow White film has gotten more hate than anything in a long time, even before people saw it. And as it happens, the movie is actually pretty decent, and the haters are just looking for things to be disgusted about. The movie finds ways to get creative with some of the classic story ideas, while staying true to just about all of the major beats.  For example, actress Rachel Zeigler has commented that this is not about a woman waiting for a Prince to come rescue her. And she’s right. There’s no Prince here. Instead it’s a thief, Robin Hood-style, who steals from the wealthy Queen to feed the poor and hungry, and serves as the love interest.

The movie is a musical that has loads of new songs added to it, that were not in the original 1930s animated film. And for the most part they are pretty good. Especially in the first half. It would have been smarter to feature them mostly in the first half and then stop doing them as much in the second, because in the second half, you really need the story to be moving along and not getting slowed down. But they don’t do that, and some of the songs in the second half do lose our attention and kill some of the momentum.

What does work here is the story about a woman whose mother dies and whose father remarries an evil woman, only to see him die, and the evil woman now take charge of the family (and the kingdom,) and imprison our protagonist. Snow White goes from being a princess to a servant. This is all very similar to the story of Cinderella, in terms of evil Step Mothers and forced labor. The difference here is the castle setting and royalty angle. But this Queen has magic on her side too, in the form of a magic mirror that constantly tells her she’s the fairest, meaning prettiest. The magic mirror, as rendered by CGI here, is fantastic. It’s one of the coolest things about the movie.

The Queen sends Snow White apple picking and hires a huntsman to kill her along the way. Only the huntsman doesn’t do it, and leaves Snow White in the forest, where she ends up finding the cottage of the Seven Dwarves. These dwarves are all CGI rendered creations, and they look pretty great. In fact, they look about as good as CGI renderings of people can, while also being intentionally a little cartoonish. The dwarves are absolutely one of the best things about the movie. Especially Dopey, who gets his own subplot about learning how to speak, which is actually pretty charming..

And Zeigler, herself, as Snow White, has a fantastic voice, (she debuted in Speilberg’s West Side Story remake,) and really gets the chance to show it off in this film. Gal Gadot as the evil queen is also pretty good. There’s not a thing wrong with the casting here, including the CGI Seven Dwarves. And the two songs of the Seven Dwarves, High Ho and Whistle While You Work, are by far the best songs in the movie. These, of course, are the classic and iconic Snow White songs that fans of the classic film know and love (while the other famous song, “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” is not in this movie.) During the two Seven Dwarves songs, characters do all sorts of silly and comedic things that bring up slapstick moves like those of Charlie Chaplin in the Gold Rush. And there’s also lots of great effects work, not just on the characters, but on what they are doing. “High-Ho,” for example, takes place almost entirely in a cave with the characters riding in mine carts at record speeds along underground tracks. And it has them mining by touching the stones and diamonds and lighting them up, in cool, bright, Pacific Rim-like glowing colors.

So there’s a lot here that works. And that includes the change in the romantic relationship from the original. In the original film, a Prince happens to be wandering through the woods when he comes across a coma-stricken Snow White, and he gets off his horse, goes over to her and kisses her.. This is weird, of course. Forget the consent thing for a moment, although that is definitely a part of it too. But how about just going over and kissing someone you don’t know, because she’s pretty? A stranger. Here, things are different. Snow White and Jonathan, the leader of the bandits, do have a relationship. They have fallen for each other, by the time she is in the coma. And in fact, one of the best moments in the film has Snow White tell one of the other thieves that Jonathan is selfish, and the thief explains to her that Jonathan took an arrow for her, by literally stepping in front of an arrow that he saw was aimed in her direction.

While all of that does work about the film, what doesn’t work quite as well is the violence. It’s just not realistic in any way. Now this is not meant to be the action version of Snow White, (we got that in the Chris Hemsworth version, Snow White and the Huntsman,) but the movie puts itself in unnecessary situations where it has no way out, other than to be unrealistic, and really shouldn’t have backed itself into a corner like that to begin with. An example of this  comes when the thieves go up against a group of armed, trained knights. There is a fight between the two groups, and not only does no one die, but the thieves actually hold their own. Really?

 Other than the occasionally ridiculous action scenes, like that knives vs thieves fight, and some songs that definitely slow things down in the second half, the movie is pretty good. The story works and the seven dwarves are a lot of fun. It’s not a great movie at all, but it certainly has plenty to like.