Banal efficiency has replaced careful artistry at Disney. There is not any raison d’etre behind the string of remakes. There’s no creative impulse and hardly any pulse at all. This is dead art, making the artful artless, extracting the soul of a thing and leaving behind the rotted out husk, a withered apple core that resembles a movie that used to be there.
Snow White may have a string of controversies tied to it but it’s existentially inert, it’s so much of nothing that dissecting it in seriousness as though it has any serious aspirations also feels like dead weight criticism. To approach the movie at all from a critical framework is to approach it far outside its intentions for why it exists. It exists to extract money from parents of children who need to fill some time, not to be assessed, nor thought about in any broader capacity.
To do this critical thinking about Snow White, or any Disney remake, is to fall into the trap of the populist abyss, wherein there is no end to the insufferable emptiness of this artistic limbo. If you must remake a respected animated film, you must begin the process with respect, something Disney no longer holds for itself, its movie division just an arbitrary theme park advertisement more often than it is the genesis of its creative identity, if a massive corporation may have any identity at all.
And so we arrive at Marc Webb’s Snow White to find a shell of a movie. The film could have been directed by anyone, so anonymous and stripped of filmic language is it, so tepidly literal in its shot selections and so plainly bored of itself as a remake of a better thing it has no aspirations to match or exceed.
In this hollow shell of corporately assigned apathy, hell is a pack of computer animated dwarves. Why is it that in a film that is live action, only the wildlife and the dwarves must be made with computers? What is magical and fantastical are animals that can communicate with humans and dwarfism generally. But not specifically because dwarfs are otherwise employed within the movie in two other scenarios, but the named and primary dwarfs are fantastical and badly computer animated characters. That their primacy is given short shrift is insulting and another banal choice in a movie that only makes banal choices.
Rachel Zegler is fine as Snow White. The costume works on her. Call it damning with faint praise but nobody else is really fine in it. Gal Gadot is as atrocious as her politics, perhaps among the most dismal of Disney villain performances, registering as a zero as Evil Queen Grimhilde, an embarrassing performance with ugly autotuned singing. Not as abhorrent but equally frustrating is Jonathan as played by Andrew Burnap who is probably blameless enough but has no chemistry at all with the lead and no real purpose existing within the story as a Prince, who no longer saves, and is written (to be fair) more like women are so often written as love interests — as his character jokes, he’s “Princess Jonathan” and that’s true, there is an inversion that would be interesting if it had more to do than to make it a punchline.
Zegler caught undue flack for saying that we deserved a more Politically Correct Snow White. Given she represents the Colombian diaspora, it’s fair for her to mount a self-defense to the ugly idea on social media that Snow White can only be white and nothing else and based on talent, it’s fair for Zegler to center any musical. Wasn’t West Side Story (2021) critical proof that she could do it? She can. She has a great voice and presence and often it feels like the movie is literally only her, whether because she is either surrounded by only computerized dwarves or completely inert co-stars who cede the screen to her chemistry with the camera which is the only love story in this movie.
The songs are fine, right? The classics are presented somewhat plainly. The new material is instantly forgotten but the classic tunes and whistling in the woods still hold our ears. Because those are tuneful songs embedded in the story and character plotting — Snow White can talk to animals and is a mystic who teaches self-actualization to the Dwarves — but the new songs carry little meaning or weight in the narrative, and exist to buff out the runtime and lack of interesting things that really happen in the movie.
Ultimately Snow White is another rotten apple. A remake that removes any reason for watching a movie. A way to make more money off of selling people something they already know. A risk-free and impotent story of whistled tunes and vindictive witchcraft in the forest that makes nothing of either quality. A wide miss.