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Snow White's biggest problem is that it thinks its audience is stupid, and it's believed this for four years. Thousands of things have been said about this live-action film, its actresses, their skin color, their intentions to change the original story, their use of dwarf actors, a nearly half-decade-long debate about Disney's most hated live-action film, which is saying a lot. Turned into something extremely political and controversial, even before the film has even been released, a hatred that I must say seems tragic and excessively focused on its very talented lead actress, but which unfortunately is also understood as the natural reaction after 10 years of Disney trying too hard, and which unfortunately collide here under a standard of disapproval.
Snow White tried so hard and boasted so much about its originality that it ended up digging its own grave. It promised a modern, feminist, egalitarian, and recalibrated version of the 90-year-old tale where women gain power in the narrative, dwarves are no longer the subject of circus ridicule, and princes are no longer saviors driven by romantic desire, and all of that was a superficial lie. In other words, the film changes its main themes so that Snow White is composed of less simple things. She now desires to free a people oppressed by injustice, and that is her main motivation as a character. But that is all a glimpse of something, an intention, and that remains at that; it is not a conviction.
Snow White is not written under a modern and inspiring idea that vindicates the tale, it has glimpses of it in select scenes or rather dialogues, but as far as the rest is concerned it is still the original tale with all its wrinkles and that brings contradictions and very serious thematic hypocrisies because of course we have to highlight the modern heroine who replaces the canon of the Disney princess, but the villain is bad because she worries about being pretty because that is what bad women worry about, I suppose. They take away gender-imposing qualities from one character to maintain the other. They give one character assumptions to write the other important woman in the story with the flatness of a fable, and that's a problem throughout the script. This kind of clash between beliefs that can't coexist, like wanting to talk about a people and their crushed autonomy, but never having a scene or a detail that matters, or that gives it life, layers, or sensitivity because that would distract you from seeing the dwarves dancing, or a protagonist who doesn't need to be saved by a man because she's perfectly capable, only to be saved by the prince with a kiss without her being able to do anything about it. Because how could Disney allow them to remove such an iconic part of the original film? Or a king and queen whom everyone loves, but only because they tell you so, a narrator vomits it up in your face. There's no action, anecdote, scene, or montage that tells us that this family deserves respect. They assume it, they don't build it.
This live action touches with timid brushstrokes the themes that supposedly modernized the tale and thanks to that it lacks emotion and conclusive power at all times, it lacks conviction and commitment to that idea of modernizing, no idea ends up connecting with another and others even contradict each other, either you modernize the story or you recreate the simple original tale, you must commit to one of the two ideas and in this case they are more committed to doing fan service, recreating the iconic, even if that runs over the few intentions of modernizing this tale but the worst thing and thanks to that is that this film does not have a premise, it does not have an idea that the film defends, it cannot be about kindness because Snow White is only kind as an external characteristic to dress the character but it is never talked about as a theme, it is not explored, it is not put into practice or developed, there is no plot about it. Her relationship with her people is superficial, distant, they are not characters, they are extras, the film does not care. It also can't be a coming-of-age story because Snow White has a tiny arc in which she starts out as good and knowing what she wants, and the only thing that changes later in the story is that she decides to reach out to take it. Yes, it's an arc, but a very small one, a very small movement in the story. It can't be a love story because there's no intention to that theme either, and how could it be important to the characters? It's fleeting.
The film isn't about anything because it aims to give mini-lessons about everything that's theoretically relevant to Disney today, while simultaneously recreating the first film. Her kingdom and world are flat, as is her beauty-hungry villain, and, truth be told, so is her protagonist. I previously said that her motivations are less straightforward than the first version. I was cautious in saying "less straightforward" because they're not more complex. This isn't a complex character in any sense, neither narratively in form nor thematically in substance, because she defends a paper world that only wants her because the narrator tells you so, and that she's fit to rule because the narrator indicates so. That means that when she completes her journey and earns her role as ruler and defeats the villain, there's no emotional release, no force behind it because there's no building. In this film, there's Snow White, the dwarves, the villain, and the prince, and they expect you to believe that there's a world-building going on around them, a kingdom they must liberate, and why do you care?
This film, due to its superficiality, is even less powerful than a children's film of yesteryear, and much of this has to do with the condescension with which it's made. There's nothing to learn, feel, or discover in its veins because everything is vomited into you as a fact, not as a reward from the story. And no, it has nothing to do with it being a children's film. If it were, again, it's an incompatibility of ideas that shouldn't exist. You can't have the characters talk about rebellion, autonomy, and terms of totalitarianism clearly written to appeal to a modern adult or mature audience, and as an attempt to complicate the idea of the story, and then defend the incompetence of the rest of the film by saying it's a children's film.
As I said, there's no commitment or conviction; it's a children's film with adult touches written with the idea that whoever watches it will be too dumb to understand them, and that's what bothered me the most: that condescension, that empty attempt. The promise of modernity, of adulthood, of that responsibility to contemporary audiences, and the result being a trembling spoon that wants to feed you without soiling the bib, is a corporate and false attempt to complicate a simple, childish story with a theme of impoverished rebellion.
This is their worst affront: lying to coexist, promising something that is already clear to be done with falsehood and market premeditation, and putting on the little star that they are changing the world, which they are fulfilling in new narratives. This, this is precisely what people hate: mega-productions taking a list of pending issues or debts to society and shoving them into a movie because clearly, no one believes the ideas they profess in Snow White. When they believe and care, it shows, too. I find it very sad that the directors who make these projects are now just front men. Do you think Marc Webb, the same man who directed (500) Days of Summer, can be seen in this movie? Or Guy Ritchie, Barry Jenkins, Jon Favreau, NO. They're front men with needs that Disney uses to give these things some credibility, and all these problems are without even mentioning Gal Gadot's horrible performance or the fact that Snow White isn't the ethnicity Twitter says she should be, because those things really pale in comparison to the film's deeper problems and the reasons why it doesn't work lately.
Unfortunately, I've seen almost all of the live-action films, and so far, only this one and The Lion King have left me feeling sad and defeated. I took a gamble, bought my ticket, and lost, because I knew I was going to see something mediocre, but at least I expected the craft to take seriously what should be fun in these types of films: the cute, the exciting, the mellow, the romantic. That's what families go to see for that kind of film, and this one doesn't even deliver. The color is beautiful (if that helps).
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