Who Keeps Asking for This?

By: Grace Troidl

Almost nine decades since the original film, Disney’s first princess Snow White has gotten a live-action movie. The reception of this children’s movie has been bizarre, with the main actress receiving death threats and online bullying, and the movie being relentlessly review-bombed by internet trolls. Who knew this many people cared about Snow White? And is this movie truly as bad as people are saying?

I am going to jump right into it and address the main thing on everyone’s mind, which is Snow White’s hair. I’m not a hair expert, but I found myself staring at her hairstyle in every scene because of how much I disliked it. It mostly stays true to the original, but it feels as if the hair and makeup department were trying to overcompensate due to the backlash the film was already receiving for the casting of Snow White, and rather than picking a short hairstyle that better suited the actress, they settled on whatever that was. While Gal Gadot looks more like the animated character than Snow White does, her main flaw is her below-average acting. I was constantly wishing for more emotion from her. In some scenes, she gets close to being an intimidating villain, but mostly, she is just straight-faced and stale for the entire film. On the other hand, Rachel Zegler acts in an almost animated way, fitting the film and her character. Her voice isn’t as highly pitched as the original Snow White’s voice was, but it still works in this film, it is sweet and pleasing to the ear. The most annoying aspect, though, is the dwarfs. They are a CGI nightmare and look like they were pulled right out of The Polar Express, and it is especially jarring to see them next to Snow White.

The plot remains mostly the same, but Snow White spends way too much time anywhere but with the dwarfs. She barely forms a meaningful relationship with any of them besides Dopey and seems to have more of a connection with the woodland animals than them. There is also the more obvious change of Snow White having actual aspirations, unlike the original. I understand wanting to give the princess more depth, and felt that the changes to Snow White’s character made sense, she aspired to be a good leader to the people and avenge her fathers death, but what I found myself confused by was the decision to change Prince Florian into a Robin Hoodesque character, rather than just giving the prince depth as well, especially when “Jonathan” falls in love with Snow just as fast as the prince did in the original. Snow and Jonathan have a whole song together, Princess Problems, where Jonathan essentially tells her that he can’t be bothered to help her because she belongs to the royal family, and then eight minutes later (literally), he takes an arrow through the chest for her. He also constantly gets caught or injured despite being the leader of a gang. I don’t know how he survived this long without Snow or someone else having to come save him. Aside from this, the romance between them was…okay. They have the least amount of chemistry compared to the other live-action royal couples, but they have a cute scene of two. In the end, I’m just not entirely convinced that Jonathan was a necessary change, plot-wise.

Besides the classic songs from the original, this film introduces seven new ones. But to be honest, aside from Waiting On A Wish, they are all completely unmemorable. The song Good Things Grow starts the movie off and then is sung again multiple times throughout the movie, which would be fine due to it being used to drive home the narrative that the kingdom was better under Snow White’s father, except this song is just boring. All Is Fair was decent, if not a bit cringeworthy. Gal Godot’s singing went back and forth between sounding grating and sounding…just okay. A Hand Meets A Hand was better, in the classic cheesy Disney love song kind of way, but the real star of the show was Waiting On A Wish. In fact, the only emotion I felt during the entire movie was a result of this song, which was mostly due to Zegler’s voice and her ability to powerfully convey emotions through her singing.

So, do I think this movie is a particularly great one? No. Do I think it is bad enough to be rated as the worst movie of all time on IMDB? Definitely not. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the tsunami of hate this film has received is not all, or even mostly, due to the quality. There is an attempt here to pin its “failure” in the box office on one particular person, which I don’t think is fair. There were many people behind this film who were in charge of making the decisions so many are critiquing. I ask, “Who keeps asking for this?” because every time a new live-action movie comes out, the internet lets out a collective sigh. I think there is a live-action fatigue, and people are tired of Disney putting on a shiny coat of paint and presenting something as new when they could try to make new, original movies that people might actually watch and enjoy. Overall, I have no strong feelings towards this movie one way or another. I give it a solid 3 out of 5 stars.