Other than Rachel Zegler’s unflattering hairdo, the new Disney’s Snow White bears little resemblance to the original and still-beloved 1937 feature cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The outline is there, but the spirit and charm are gone and it’s all kind of bland.
The romantic fairy tale at the center of the original story has been hollowed out, and the movie, which opened in Israel on Thursday and around most of the world on Friday, plays like The Hunger Games meets a Taylor Swift self-empowerment anthem meets a women’s leadership seminar.
Snow White (Zegler) is the oppressed representative of an entire oppressed people (who dress in Hunger Games-style drab burlap), under the thumb of the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot), her vain, jealous stepmother.
The Evil Queen wears jewel-studded black gowns – Gadot looks great – and tells her starving people that what they need are diamonds, not flowers, because diamonds are forever. But the people are not about to get either, much to their mean ruler’s delight and Snow White’s dismay.
The rumors, sparked by remarks that Zegler made to the press about how the new version is about the princess discovering “the leader she can be” rather than finding love are true: 2025’s Snow White doesn’t need any prince and doesn’t sing the iconic “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
Given that Zegler said she was uneasy with the original because the prince “literally stalked” the princess, the powers-that-be must have deemed the lovey-dovey lyrics of the beloved ballad cringey. Who needs romantic drama when you can fantasize about a future of happy townspeople working together for the greater good in farms and fields, square dancing, and smiling beatifically, which takes place – spoiler alert – in the finale here?
The movie was dogged by rumors and issues, both that its co-stars weren’t getting along due to politics and various reports about the dwarfs: that the dwarf characters represent offensive stereotypes and should have been dropped altogether and that the CGI dwarfs that were used should have been played by live actors.
But when the lights go down, all the noise surrounding the release fades and the question is only: What’s on the screen and does it work?
Not 'an unqualified disaster'
I wouldn’t call Snow White “an unqualified disaster,” the famous phrase New York Times critic Vincent Canby used to condemn Heaven’s Gate. Snow White has its moments, mainly Gadot’s scheming and Zegler’s singing, but I found myself wondering what a young child today who had never seen the original would make of all the chatter about leadership and justice that now fill the place of the romance and magic that propelled the plot of the original – and of every other fairy tale. There are several new songs, but although I only wrote this a few hours after watching the movie, I couldn’t quote you a single line from any of them.
The good news is that Zegler has a beautiful singing voice. It made her a star after she appeared in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, and it’s perfect for Snow White. She has a sweet presence and performs songs in Snow White winningly.
Gadot’s Evil Queen is the only character who gets to have anything resembling fun, and she narrows her eyes and sets her jaw in anger when Snow White, now a scullery maid, dares to speak out on behalf of the oppressed people of the kingdom, then snarls when the mirror breaks it to her that she is no longer the fairest of them all.
Gadot’s singing is basically her talking with a certain musical lilt, a style perfected by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, and she does it just fine.
The movie begins with a prologue of Snow White’s origin story, which clears up a point that bothered some fans, when a narrator explains she got her name because it was snowing the day she was born, not because of her skin color.
Snow White and her parents live in an idyllic community where there is liberty and justice for all, until her mother dies and her father brings home the wickedest stepmother of all time. Her father goes off to war and never returns, and the Evil Queen reduces her stepdaughter to the position of a servant and gets rich by robbing all her subjects.
Before the famous mirror utters the words that lead the queen to order her huntsman to kill Snow White, the princess meets a guy named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), a rather pallid prince substitute, who turns out to be a Robin Hood-type stealing potatoes.
He robs from the palace to feed the bandits he runs with in the forest, one of whom turns out to be a non-CGI dwarf, which muddies the waters of the whole dwarf controversy, and is confusing because he looks very different from the CGI ones, who have enormous heads.
The movie more or less works up to the point when Snow White awakens in the dwarfs’ cottage and gets the place in order. The effects are nice and scary when she runs through the forest and, well, Disney sure knows how to do cute forest critters.
But the dwarfs get a little creepy, as CGI characters often do. The Pixar animators’ early genius was that they realized that humans and humanoids look weird in CGI and so they concentrated on toys, cars, and fish. But the dwarfs here get too many closeups.
Once Snow White has tidied up the cottage and before the queen shows up with the poisoned apple, the movie fills time by giving Snow White a quest: She will join the bandits fighting the queen so that she can go off and investigate whether her father is truly alive somewhere, a storyline that peters out whenever it isn’t needed.
There’s a bit of romance between her and Jonathan, but it’s made clear that she calls the shots. She doesn’t need saving: Message received.
It would have been nice to see a little more of Gadot, but since she is the most fun character, her presence has to be rationed since this is a movie about virtue and any fun is incidental.
Disney keeps on creating live-action remakes of its animated classics and it seems that it’s so that they can keep making money off their tried-and-true intellectual property. This trend also gives the studio the opportunity to update plot points that will seem dated, racist, or sexist to contemporary audiences.
While a few live-action remakes have been good – Aladdin was probably the most fun – I think most children will always prefer the cartoon versions, and so will a lot of adults.
But Snow White has gotten a much bigger plot overhaul than the previous live-action films and it’s an experiment in whether reworking a beloved story to fit today’s stringent social/political conventions can work.
There’s an expression making the rounds lately, “Go woke, go broke,” as many attempts at trendy entertainment that fit with today’s political climate have failed. But with its massive multi-million-dollar global publicity machine, it’s unlikely Disney will go broke with Snow White.
Children will see the posters and the clips and will get their parents to take them. It might even turn a profit. But will children really love this film the way generations embraced the original, will they dream about it?
That seems doubtful, but Disney, like the Evil Queen, will likely be content to enjoy the diamonds the profits from this film will allow them to purchase.