Movie Review – Snow White (2025)
Principal Cast : Rachel Zengler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap, Jeremy Swift, Martin Klebba, George Zalazar, Titus Burgess, Andrew Grotelueschen, Jason Kravits, Andrew Barth Feldman, Patrick Page, Hadley Fraser, Lorena Andrea, Adrian Bower.
Synopsis: A princess joins forces with seven dwarfs and a group of rebels to liberate her kingdom from her cruel stepmother the Evil Queen.
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As cynical as I’ve been about the Disney Corporation’s continued efforts to mine their own animated IP and transmogrify things into bloated, entirely unnecessary live-action remakes – of which, the recent Little Mermaid adaptation is one of the most egregious – one can’t help but feel that all their research, all their marketing and all their data suggests that somewhere, somehow, there’s a market for this kind of entertainment. And in truth, the modern live action blockbuster remakes of Disney’s vaunted animated canon, which ostensibly began with Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderalla back in 2015, have been nothing if not commercially successful, despite much critical division. It’s hard to argue with sheer box office receipts. However, box office has never been a true indicator of creative and artistic legacy, and for me the usurpation of the animated films’ being remade into largely soulless, facile clones lacking the same kind of soul sours me on the motivation behind making them. Let’s call Snow White, the 2025 adaptation loosely based on the Brothers’ Grimm fairytale and Disney’s own branded IP, for what it actually is: a cash grab, and a pretty controversial one at that. As I’ve often declared about these remakes, the reason for its existence as a work of fiction isn’t to propel the premise at any narrative level or attempt to offer insight into the subtext of the Grimm’s fable, but rather – again – to trade heavily on adult nostalgia for a brilliant, winsome, often misogynistic animated movie that pushed boundaries in the 1930’s, but here hasn’t translated well into modern times at all.
Director Marc Webb, better known in nerd circles as the man behind the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies, as well as 500 Days of Summer, has crafted a superficially stunning, magnificently produced and mounted small-E epic musical fantasy film, gifted with a tremendous vocal talent in Rachel Zegler (as Snow White) and the anaemic acting ability of former Wonder Woman Gal Gadot. The film certainly showcases Zegler’s range as a performer, imbuing her take on Snow White with the wide-eyed fairytale innocence girls between the ages of 6 and 10 will immediately attach to. Disney, as part of its brand, certainly downplays the more horrific elements of the Grimm story, which manifests as this kind of cloyingly cute, simplistically written bastard child of hokey old genre tropes (which I get, I mean that’s exactly what the film is) and weird, post-modern insertion of… I don’t know, clunky feminist ideals hammered home with the nuance of nuclear weaponry. I think part of the problem with Webb’s film is that, for the most part, the story of Snow White is now a story out of time – and certainly out of place – in the digital age.
The underlying subtext of the Grimm story, that of impossible beauty standards, jealousy and grief, don’t quite land with the same resonance now that everyone on Earth has access to Instagram and the internet, and Erin Cressida Wilson’s adaptive screenplay fails to covert this kind of messaging into something modern audiences can understand. In Disney’s original film, Snow White barely had any agency (which is problematic in today’s Hollywood machine) and so the filmmakers have attempted to ratchet up her sense of self and actualised her into a heroine-adjacent figure of centrality, despite poor Zegler having to emote all manner of character development through the plethora of new songs – most of which aren’t very good-slash-memorable – leaving her rudderless in an admittedly very glossy, VFX-driven tentpole film opposite an equally rudderless Gal Gadot, as the Evil Queen. The idea of Snow White being rescued by a handsome prince, a cliché as old as time itself, is anathema to Disney’s current raison d’etre in terms of storytelling, so they give the poor girl some additional heft by making her a figurehead to rally the kingdom to her cause. I could see where the writer were trying to course-correct a hoary “ye olde timey” narrative crutch but the film isn’t strong enough elsewhere to make it work. Most of the characters aside from Snow and the Queen are paid lip-service attention as sidebar notations to the primary story; I will admit, though, that despite being entirely CG-driven, the legendary seven dwarfs actually became the strongest element of the whole movie.
The film is really far too long to support such weak motivations. Zegler’s Snow and the Gadot’s Queen lack earthy realism, at least of the kind needed to ground the fantastical elements of the movie in some kind of suspension of disbelief. The first hour of the movie traipses through the well-known aspects of the original Disney film, right up until Snow is returned to life by the Prince’s kiss after biting the poisoned apple – and there’s still an hour to go! There’s a point at which Snow joins forces with the film’s Prince (actually just a peasant dude who has fled into the forest to rebel against the Queen) in what can only be described as a bizarre Robin Hood & His Merry Men folly, an expansion of the lore that really feels clunky to the point of being annoying. The addition of Andrew Burnap’s Jonathan, the romantic interest for Snow White, ought to have worked but the film feels like it shifts focus too heavily onto him instead of remaining with the principal character herself, and this tonal shift about half way through the movie undercuts any potential conflict between Snow and the Queen, who effectively disappears from a large portion of the film for a while. Again, there’s intent and execution – Snow White is intentionally modified to feed into modernity and current social expectation, but again, the story itself really has been passed by the decades since it might have felt relevant, making everything here very tough going.
Also, and perhaps most crucially, the addition of new songs to the IP is a concern. On the one hand, Disney need to sell iTunes subscriptions and albums and stream data, and having Zegler’s superb voice warbling the classic anthems of the original animated classic – “Heigh Ho” and “Whistle While You Work” chief among them – is beautifully rendered. On the other hand, the glaringly cringeworthy additions of “All is Fair”and “Waiting on A Wish” force the film to stumble, and excruciatingly extend the running time more than necessary. Webb and his team have mismanaged balancing narrative momentum and musical flourishes, hoping, no doubt, to use song as a way to move character development and plot points forward. The fact that the songs don’t seem to “sit” into the film as comfortably as the tracks and melodies everyone knows is jarring, especially to somebody like me hoping that, if we have to endure this pointless remix of original ideas, they’ll just stick to the well worn path. Nope; off we go into another middle-distance-staring aria or solo about wishing to love or talking to birds or whatnot.
Among the better aspects of the whole film is the production value, and Snow White certainly looks like a billion dollars. The set design, costuming and production value in the visual effects, both practical and digital, is of the highest calibre, and Webb’s glorious colour palette certainly puts more recent chroma-deficient films (see Wicked, for example) in the shade. The wonderful depiction of the Dwarf’s cottage, set deep within a woodland glade that feels very Hobbiton-esque with its quaint design and semi-anthropomorphised animalia, is breathtakingly gorgeous, and honestly if the film had just stayed right there with the dwarfs clowning about, it might have made for a more interesting movie. The dwarfs themselves, rendered completely digitally, are actually really well designed (riffing on the original animated character but tweaked just enough to be different yet recognisable) and they have legitimately good characterisation. The film pushes Dopey firmly to the forefront, and of all the digital work in the movie, it’s his boyish and charming persona that connects with us emotionally. Given the character barely speaks at all, this is a tremendous success.
I land firmly on the side of the argument that these live action remixes of Disney’s animated canon are blatantly cynical cash-grabs and entirely unnecessary. One could argue that about any film, I guess, but for a studio as financially successful and strongly creative as the Mouse House to just ape itself – often with gaudy, why-am-I-watching-this results – I struggle to overcome my bias that in almost every respect the animated film versions work because they’re animated. Artistically and critically, these live-action films don’t last beyond the big screen is largely because they trade too heavily on nostalgia for something else, rather than paving a new path. They’re artistic vapourware, the equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal of cinematic heft, and with the same intellectual nourishment. When was the last time you sat down as a family to watch the Mulan remake that dropped on Disney+ at the height of Covid?
Disney could be spending all this money on new and interesting ideas, fostering original IP for future generations to enjoy, rather than recycling ideas from both their origins and recent history; with access to streaming, even the argument that kids can’t access older movies like the original Snow White, Cinderella, or even more recent stuff like Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, and that these films provide a new gateway of exploration, seems predicated on how many dollars the studio can extract from parental pockets. Snow White will be an absolute smash for little girls of a certain age, and I guess that’s Disney’s whole point isn’t it: to find the demographic and cater to that almost at the expense of its own soul.
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