People either love or hate live-action remakes, and they do not appear to be going away anytime soon. Each adaptation that comes out has some form of marketing controversy, some more than others, but for the purpose of this review, we will focus solely on analyzing the film. Today, we will be reviewing “Snow White,” which presently holds a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes and 1.6/10 on IMDB. No spoilers.
We believe a good live-action remake must either lean heavily into nostalgia or have some new, interesting twists. For instance, Disney’s “Maleficent” and “Mufasa: The Lion King,” took a more creative route with these beloved storylines, while “The Jungle Book” and “Cinderella” were a more direct retelling. Of course, we will also continue to rate based on whether the movie makes an interesting point, or reason to watch it.
The movie’s plot differed in a few ways compared to the original, which also impacted its overall message to the audience. It features Princess Snow White who teams up with the dwarves and bandits, including her love interest Jonathan, to remove her stepmother, the Evil Queen, from rule. They also expanded upon the general narrative by adding quite a bit of backstory to certain characters. Unfortunately, some of these changes made the scenes feel unnecessarily lengthy despite the movie’s average run time.
In true Disney fashion, they added more songs to this movie. The whole point of songs in musicals is to contribute to or move the plot along in some way. As much as we wanted to like them, most of the songs did not add anything unique to the movie and flopped. The original songs–at least the ones they decided to include–were the most catchy, while the others were forgotten the moment we stepped out of the theater. The actors’ beautiful voices were the only thing keeping us entertained throughout.
Rachel Zegler’s acting as Snow White was far better than Gal Gadot’s Evil Queen. However, this was neither of their best performances. Their portrayal felt too fake, as their mannerisms were too exaggerated and created a level of detachment for the audience. However, people seem to forget that this is a PG kids movie at heart, and it is normal for the acting to be over the top
The world-building and setting were enchanting, no doubt about it; but, we were not fond of the way they animated the dwarves–Disney made them look uncanny and straight-up creepy. Some of the outfits were gorgeous, while others looked like they were costumes from a Halloween store. This sums up the entire movie: when any singular aspect takes one step forward, they simultaneously take two steps back.
We are strong believers in watching a movie at least once to form an opinion and not judging it solely on what others say. For us, this was a one-and-done kind of movie. Let’s just say, you will most likely find us listening to “Speechless” from “Aladdin” and not “Waiting on a Wish” from “Snow White.” Altogether, we rate the movie a 5/10.
