Disney's Snow White

The controversies surrounding Disney's latest Snow White film have been many and merciless. Apart from controversial comments from stars and that the film has been accused of following some kind of woke agenda, Disney has generally had a hard time convincing its loyal fans with its live action remakes. Their lacklustre remakes have failed to convince for years, and before Snow White was even released, it became the bread and butter of YouTube creators who fed off the constant negativity.

Very little of this spite has found its way into the film, however. In fact, the headline-making media circus is far more interesting than the film itself, which is sadly just another entry in a long line of smeared Disney remakes. I almost wish the film had been more daring than it actually is, because perhaps the most controversial film of the year is nothing more than a harmless children's film that no one will remember in the long run. The question is rather how bad the film really is at its core?

Snow White is an extended reinterpretation of Walt Disney's 1937 animated masterpiece, taking a simple fairytale story and filling it with more modern, forward-thinking ideas about standing up to injustice. However, the Snow White film with Kristen Stewart already did this in 2012, so this remake has very little new to say on that point. Although the film is technically more complicated in terms of plot, it is also emptier and more breathless. The simplicity of the fairy tale and the message of how far kindness can take you is overshadowed here by the film's childish battle between good and evil, and halfway through this leafy film, the length really starts to wear on you.

Rachel Zegler is actually decent as the title character. Her lower jaw certainly has a strange life of its own in several scenes, but she manages to sell her innocent character, who has isolated herself from her stepmother's domination and soon becomes a symbol of freedom for the oppressed people. Zegler at least offers some human charm in the film's sticky CGI mire, something Gal Gadot unfortunately fails to do.

Let's put it this way: some actors get away with their comically bad performance because they know full well that they're in a crap film and do it just for the paycheck, in a forgivingly self-aware way. Gal Gadot is not one of them. She's terrible as the film's antagonist, who here reaches downright cringeworthy levels of melodrama. As a little gem, the Queen in Walt Disney's original film was nightmare material, but in this remake, the Queen is so parodic that what little excitement the film might have had just fades away. Her song 'All is Fair' is overacting gone mad.

Speaking of songs, the soundtrack is not much to write home about. There's nothing wrong with Jeff Morrow's composition, but the new songs don't mesh well with the remixed classics, which themselves sound like overproduced AI productions. Banj Pasek and Justin Paul's new material also lacks identity and personality, making the many new songs sound the same and blend into a single generic soundtrack. At least it matches the film's splashy Disneyland-style visuals.

Once the dwarves are introduced, the film turns into a straightforward uncanny valley horror that deters more than charms. The dwarves are now called "magical creatures", who can use their magic to identify diamonds in the caves. There is no reason whatsoever for this detail, other than presumably to avoid discussions about little people. However, these characters will amuse the younger children and the cute computer-animated animals will distract them from the plot.

If it's not already clear, we adults have very little to take from this film, as there is very little to get excited about. It's a typical Disney reinterpretation with sloppy varnish, but very little below the surface. At the same time, the film is more entertaining than the horrible The Little Mermaid and far less frustrating than the recent Beuaty and the Beast interpretation. But while there are still some reasonably solid scenes, you don't need a magic mirror to tell you that the original is still the fairest of them all.