Disney buries their live action ambitions in a glass coffin for all to see.
Disney’s live-action Snow White is less a fairy tale, more a cautionary tale—for filmmakers, executives, and possibly those who continue to cast Gal Gadot in anything that requires even the slightest hint of humanity or emotion. It’s the latest victim in the studio’s increasingly cursed effort to deliver the kiss of true box office love to the slumbering corpses of their animated classics and parade them around like nostalgic revenants.
Directed by Marc Webb – whose filmography is a rollercoaster best described as “peaked early” – Snow White tries too hard, right out of the gate swapping the original’s pioneering, timeless charm for a kind of lifeless visual noise and a reinterpretation that disrespects its source material as heavily as it patronises modern sensibilities. Snow White – named so because she was born during a blizzard and not problematically in honour of her skin colour – is born to an unfeasibly equitable kingdom whose chief economic products seem to be abundant agriculture and copious mineral wealth. So plentiful are the gemstones in this kingdom that they’re literally piled high in baskets in the local market so it’s unfortunate that medical technology hasn’t kept pace with mining expertise so when the Queen falls ill, she promptly dies leaving the King in want of someone to drape all those excess jewels over. Enter Gal Gadot’s alarmingly named Evil Queen, not that her name is in any way a red flag for the King who marries her and immediately suffers a fatal plot development of his own.
And thus, the story that we’re all familiar with begins anew. The Wicked Queen takes over, installs her magic mirror and cuts Snow White’s hair into an unflattering Lord Farquad-style page boy bob and sends her to the scullery to be a servant. Flash forward ten years – during which the Evil Queen has apparently continued to regularly trim White’s locks – and suddenly the Queen’s “Fairest of Them All” title is under threat, not least of all due to her egregious mismanagement of the economy, plunging the kingdom of bountiful crops and endless precious stones into famine and poverty.
All of this bloated padding out of the original story is accompanied by a raft of new songs, not a single one of which lingers in the memory, not even while you’re listening to it. It’s an unexpected string of flops from the songwriting duo of Pasek and Paul, who gave us The Greatest Showman, Spirited and contributed an Oscar Winning song to La La Land. Most feel like they were reverse-engineered from a Spotify playlist called “Girlboss Energy (Clean)” with the lyrical complexity of Tim Rice phoning it in. That they exist and take screen time away from some of the acting is the nicest thing you can say about them.
Although she’s shouldered much of the internet ire (and we all know why that is) Rachel Zegler does what she can. She sings beautifully, commits to the part, and somehow retains a modicum of dignity despite having to deliver dialogue that sounds like it was cribbed from a AI-powered wellness app set to be empowering. Yes, her haircut is awful but her iconic costume looks like it’s a cheap store-bought knock-off and nothing in this epic failure of a film is down to her. This is a screenplay failure. A concept failure. A directorial failure. A why-are-we-doing-this failure.
If any single performer drags Snow White down, it’s Gal Gadot – Hollywood’s reigning worst actress who keeps getting high profile work. In trying to make “Mean Gal” happen, Snow White quickly finds and exposes her limitations. Her Evil Queen is less iconic menace and more Instagram cosplay after three glasses of rosé. There’s absolutely no menace to her; no mystery. Just line readings that sound like they were phonetically memorised five minutes before the cameras rolled. Every scene with her feels like watching someone try to imitate camp without understanding irony or drama. She’s only the fairest of them all in the sense that fair can mean decent, mediocre, bang average – and to be honest she struggles to maintain that. To add injury to insult, Gadot is everything to singing that she is to acting and if you thought she’d never sing anything more tone deaf and offensive than her lockdown rendition of “Imagine”, you thought wrong.
Webb saturates the frame with colour and colourful CGI, and while I expected plentiful references to Disney’s pioneering 1937 animation work, I didn’t expect the Evil Dead homage as Snow White first enters the enchanted forest. Time and again, the film makes baffling plot or character decisions that diminish and distract. The CGI dwarves are certainly a *choice*, and despite the production controversy feel like an unforced error, especially Doc’s unnerving resemblance to Harry Knowles and Dopey’s mutated-Tom-Holland aestehtic. Somehow the seven CGI shortstacks end up more two-dimensional than their original cel-animated ancestors, this time lumbered with the additional need to fill time with sub-Minion-esque comedy antics.
Plot-wise, the film plods through the motions with the emotional investment of a tax return. The moral core has been sanded down into inoffensive platitudes, the classic story’s dark magic, whimsy, and sense of wonder gone. It’s replaced with what appears to be a collection of focus-grouped ideas and studio notes smushed into a screenplay and held together with digital glue. The Prince is entirely excised in favour of a working-class rebel bandit who nevertheless retains the urge, when confronted with Snow White’s dead body, to plant a big ol’ smooch on her.
In the end, Snow White is what happens when corporate nostalgia and brand management are mistaken for storytelling. It has the shape of a fairy tale but none of the spirit and the only thing it holds a mirror, mirror up to is Disney’s paucity of new ideas.
