Snow White and the Huntsman

The idea of rebooting fairy tales is a concept that nowadays is arguably done more than just playing the original stories straight, but it is something that wasn’t tackled as often earlier on. While nowadays its become a stable for companies like Disney (who once thrived on adapting fairy tales) to assassinate its own classic stories by sucking out all life and soul from its animated movies and painting over it with CG to pretend like its saying something different, this trend use to be seen as dangerous and not financially successful in past years. While Ever After: A Cinderella Story was arguably one of the first fairy tale adaptions in film and even films like Enchanted proved that people were into the idea of shaking up the norm of classic stories, it was Tim Burton’s 2010 film version of Alice in Wonderland that proved that these type of movies could be financially successful, which gave screenwriter, Evan Daugherty, the ability to green light an idea for a reboot of Snow White. With this in mind and considering how bad Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland movie was for completely re-contextualizing a famous story in a way that is the exact antithesis of its purpose, it should be no surprise that this movie turned out like it did. Set in the forgettable world of unnamed fantasy land, a Queen of this kingdom falls ill and dies, leaving her king and her daughter motherless. After a maiden named Ravenna (played by Charlize Theron) is rescued from bandits, the King (played by Noah Huntley) is instantly smitten and marries her, not knowing that she is actually capable of sucking youth from those fairer than her and uses her beauty to get into places of power. Before anything can be done about this, Ravenna kills the King, takes over the kingdom and locks Snow White away. Years later, a now grown Snow White (played by Kristen Stewart) escapes her capture and finds herself lost in the Dark Forest. Knowing from the Magic Mirror (voiced by Chris Obi) that Snow White is now the fairest in the land and that she is the only one capable of keeping her eternally youthful, she sends out The Huntsman (played by Chris Hemsworth) to retrieve Snow White for her. Once the two meet however, he finds he cannot do the task and decides instead to aid Snow White in returning to the kingdom and removing the evil queen from power for good. While the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland is more disrespectful to its source material, it at least does a lot more to stand out as a movie in comparison to this film, which in spite of decent box office and even a few Oscar nominations, wasn’t met with much positive reception and would later fade away from the public view as the experiment that wasn’t interesting in being inventive and more focused on being totally different, which says a lot about this mess of a movie.

If there is any fairy tale that could have benefited from a modernized update, Snow White is both a good and bad option. The original Brothers’ Grimm story is one that feels even more classical and old-fashion than many of the others in the same ballpark due to its outline and framework almost being solely used as mock-able cliches in most stories by today’s standard, so there’s this sense of destroying something so old by modernizing it to the point of completely reworking it into something different, but at the same time, this means that there is plenty of room to change up this expected route and provide something wholly original without too much fear of retaliation from hard-core original fans. Its what is done with this update where things go awry, as it feels like the movie doesn’t change enough things about the plot and characters to feel like a new coat of paint, whilst simultaneously changing too many thing about the inner workings of the story and the steps taken to reach the end goal to feel like a familiar retread. While the original fairy tale can get a pass for being a little outdated from a narrative standpoint for coming out several centuries ago, this film somehow manages to create an entirely different structure with cliches that somehow result in an even more overly simplistic, generic and forgettable storyline. featuring every expected trope associated with these kind of medieval fantastical rebellion stories, expect without anything fresh or distinct added in to make it feel like its own creation. Considering the work that these writers have either previously done or would go on to work on (Daugherty would become one of the head writers on the film versions of Divergent, which just says so much about the style and mood about this picture), it doesn’t surprise how much of this movie feels recycled, rehashed and extremely un-invigorating.  The changes made are so drastic from the original tale that when elements from the story come in like the magic mirror and the dwarfs, it feels so random and out of place like they were included solely as a connection back to the story rather than because the film itself require them or even wanted them in it in the first place. Some qualities like a heavier focus on the evil queen and how she came to be, as well as making the dwarfs not as nice as their cartoonishly familiar counterparts are the only changes that feel correct when adapting this story, but outside of that, it just feels like a run-of-the-mill fantasy story that has practically nothing to do with its source material outside of the name. As a first directing job for Rupert Sanders (who would only continue to create unimpressive and ill-fitting adaptations with the 2017 film version of Ghost in the Shell), it doesn’t paint his vision in a good light or showcase any unique filmmaking components that could’ve saved this film in any way. It feels like a teenage fantasy book made for tween girls to fawn over, it just feels secondary and horribly bland.

It’s hard to imagine how you could possibly make the characters from Snow White even more bland than they were before because it comes from a source material that was made a long time ago when character wasn’t really important in these kind of cautionary tales where the focus was more on the inventively creative premises, the messed up components surrounding the stories and the life lessons that would be scarred into children’s psyches as a result. Even in the Disney animated movie, outside of the dwarfs, the personalities of the other characters weren’t that important, so this is an update that would be desperately needed and would be nice to see, and its unfortunate that they somehow manage to make the characters even blander than they already were. Snow White is the perfect example of how not to write a main character; she does nothing throughout the entire movie, says nothing of interest, has no personality at all, yet for some reason, everybody loves her, says she’s amazing and the chosen one, and somehow manages to become Joan of Arc by the end to defeat the Queen. It feels so out of place and wrong with how this movie was set up. While a lot of it does come from the writing and the directing, a lot of the character’s problems do stem from the acting. Kristen Stewart recently come into her own as an actress and has shown that she is capable of putting in a good performance when given the chance to, but in this film, there have been planks of wood that have more expression and traits of personality than she does, its almost baffling how nothing her performance is. What’s even stranger is that Chris Hemsworth, who has proven to be a bucket load of charisma when he’s put in the right role, is somehow even blander, with no interesting backstory, feeling really out of place in this world, and having no chemistry at all with Stewart. They never say anything that would show they’re in love, they never do anything together, they barely even look each other in the face or even say each other’s name, it’s a completely failed romance that just feels like it exists because these two are physically attractive actors and that automatically means they have to get together. Most of the Dwarfs are pretty forgettable, show up way too late in the movie to get the chance to be proper characters, and despite having some great actors portraying some of them like Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Bob Hoskins, Nick Frost and Ian McShane, none of them get the chance to show off their true strengths. In a pool of uninteresting mud, Charlize Theron is a delight in this movie and is probably the only shining quality in this film, but for all the wrong reasons. For such a great actress, she is completely terrible in this movie and it is so much fun to watch. While the character is still written pretty flat despite being one of the few who is given noticeable changes that are the most part for the better, she is so over-the-top silly to the point that any time she screams a line, its read like how a fifth grader would act in a school play, its so terrible that its really funny.

For a movie that tries to look dark and gritty, the film tries to accomplish this not be inserting in more disturbing characters and plot lines, but rather just by making everything look flat and uninteresting, which is a weird element of most of these ”trying to be taken seriously movies” evolved genre movies of this era. The world they inhabit is so traditionally medieval that there’s nothing special about it and the color palette throughout the entire film is just blue, black, and grey, it’s so unappealing. Even when light and color does come in for a second when they’re in the forest or some of the moments within the Queen’s castle, the cinematography by Grieg Fraser is so blurry and out of focus that it always looks so fake and awkward. The effects for this movie are nothing special for a fantasy story and mostly just look forgettable outside of a few choice creatures that look hideous because of the uncanny valley. The action is also really poorly handled; for something that suddenly turns into a sword-battle movie, the editing by Conrad Buff and Neil Smith is sloppy and never allows the shots to last long enough to leave a memorable image. While putting sword-fighting in something like Snow White seems really stupid, if the world, characters, and plot were better written to make that element make sense, it could have worked. One of the worse things about this movie is its screenplay by Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini; its poorly pace, the writing is either forgettable or dumb, it gives the characters nothing to chew on while also turning it into an incredibly bland story, the romance is practically nothing, the characters have no strong motivations, exposition just kinda happens out of nowhere, or sometimes things just happen in the story because it tells us that’s what its about.

Snow White and the Huntsman feels like Twilight fan-fiction (the one that came after Fifty Shades of Grey). It just doesn’t feel like its made to tell an engaging story with a source material that’s been adapted into something completely unique and new, but rather an excuse to throw some fluffy generic action-movie cliches into a bland looking movie in order to win impressionable teen girls over with the ‘’romance’’. Its possibly even more of a shame because there’s something that could be done with rebooting Snow White in a new light, but definitely not this way. The story is generic and horribly written, the characters are lifeless and have no chemistry with anybody, the effects and visuals are uninteresting, the action is poorly handled, and it doesn’t work for fans of the original story or those looking for something new. While other fairy tales would be done a second time around by Disney and those maybe have more insulting things about them, this one isn’t even really worth remembering. While it could have had its time in the sun, Snow White was not given a fair chance to be something different.