Snow White (Rachel Zegler) sings her reimagined version of classic Disney tune "Whistle While You Work" while tidying up the cottage alongside the seven dwarfs.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, which Disney live action remake is the least watchable of them all?
“Snow White.”
I’m usually one to ignore Disney’s recent trend of unnecessary live action adaptations of their classic stories, but the sheer amount of controversies surrounding their newest film, “Snow White,” made it impossible for me to turn my head away.
Casting Rachel Zegler as Snow White is one of the few things the film does right. Her superstar performances in both the film’s old and new songs left me in awe, and it helped portray the character of Snow White as determined and brave rather than meek and helpless.
Despite the changes her character undergoes, Zegler is careful to honor the qualities that made the original Snow White so beloved. Snow White remains feminine and compassionate despite the conflict she is thrown into, translating the essence of the original princess.
While Zegler shines in her role, the same cannot be said about her co-star, Gal Gadot (Evil Queen), who fails everywhere Zegler succeeds. At a certain point, Gadot’s robotic performance is so irredeemably terrible it becomes almost campy, coming across like an unusually bad community theater. Either way, Gadot’s stilted line delivery was enough to put me to eternal sleep with no poison apple needed.
The film’s visuals don’t do much to pick up Gadot’s slack, which is especially unfortunate considering the original movie’s animation is one of its greatest triumphs. As a child, the vivid, fantastical artstyle of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was what made the film worth watching; in contrast, the visuals in the remake are completely lifeless.
The forest scenes are overlaid with a warm filter that washes the landscapes yellow, and the sets are so polished they look more like screensavers. For an adaptation made 88 years after the original, I had expected it to at least look better, but the lackluster visuals of “Snow White” manage to fail in that regard as well.
One of the movie’s most inexplicable visual decisions was its approach to the seven dwarfs. “Snow White” could’ve been the perfect occasion to cast actors with dwarfism, especially considering how overlooked their talents are in Hollywood. Instead of seizing this opportunity, what Disney gives us instead are freakish, grotesque CGI iterations of the seven dwarfs that look more like flesh mutants than they do anything belonging in a kids’ movie.
What’s even stranger about this decision is the fact “Snow White” does actually cast actors with dwarfism, just not as the dwarfs. Between casting Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen and opting for CGI dwarfs instead of actual people, the casting choices in “Snow White” prove a complete mystery to me.
In a similarly controversial fashion, “Snow White” has been facing backlash for its modernization of Disney’s oldest, most classic story. The adaptation gives the plot a complete rewrite, turning Snow White into a revolutionary who stands up against her evil stepmother’s regime. Moreover, the movie makes efforts to alter the story’s take on gender roles; for instance, Zegler’s Snow White cooks and cleans alongside the dwarfs rather than serving as their housekeeper.
Some of the changes in the adaptation were for the better, but I believe Disney approached its new themes in the most boring way possible. Disney could have done something special had they dedicated the film’s empowering, anti-fascist themes toward an original story, but instead, they took the lazy route, and “Snow White” suffers from it.
There isn’t a more succinct way to describe “Snow White” than a simple swing and a miss. It tried and failed to embody more than it is, and the product is something half-baked and hard to watch.
With that being said, I can’t call my time watching this movie completely negative; I was laughing as the malformed CGI Dopey tripped over himself, as Gadot delivered her lines with zero conviction and every time Zegler’s horrendous bob was on screen. Quality-wise, “Snow White” misses just about every mark, but it’s definitely worth watching if you’re curious to see where all of the controversy comes from.