Film Review: "Snow White" (2025)
Though neither as good nor as bad as its defenders and critics would like to suggest, this newest Disney live-action remake still never justifies its existence, though Gadot is hilariously camp.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
I want to begin by saying that I am by no means a fan of Disney’s live-action remakes. In fact, I kind of hate them, and each iteration has only convinced me more that the studio has completely lost both the plot and its own identity. I thus went into Snow White fully expecting to be as annoyed as always but, somewhat to my surprise, I found it to be a pleasant, if ultimately forgettable, cinematic experience. At the same time, there’s also no question that it remains a very weird film–mired in controversy from which I doubt it will ever escape–and, at the end of the day, it still fails to justify its existence.
By now you probably know the plot of the original movie. Snow White (Rachel Zegler) lives in a magical and enchanted kingdom with her parents, until their little utopia is disrupted by the death of her mother and the arrival of the sinister Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). Once her father disappears, Snow White is turned into a drudge by the Queen, until she manages to escape, make her way into the woods, meet the Dwarfs, and kanoodle with a dashing bandit named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap). Thereafter she leads a rebellion against her stepmother and ultimately saves the kingdom.
This updated version–like so many of the other live-action remakes–fills in all kinds of blanks that never needed filling because fairy tales don’t need every single aspect of their world explained. You go into these types of stories knowing that this type of world operates according to its own logic, and you also know that a fairy tale’s narrative is, by its nature, supposed to be simple. Unfortunately, we seem to be living in an era in which audiences have to have every single plot lacunae or gap explained and filled in and explained to death, which means that the plot becomes so cluttered there are times when you just scratch your head and wonder what the hell they’re doing. It would be one thing if the new action sequences were anything to write home about, but they’re as dull and lifeless as the rest of the film.
I agree with the many critics who have lauded Rachel Zegler’s performance as Snow White. Hideous bob aside–and seriously, who on God’s green Earth thought that was a good idea?--she’s as magnetic and charismatic as she was in both West Side Story and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Once you take her “controversial” comments out of the equation, you can really appreciate the fact that we really do have a genuine musical star on our hands.
Though her co-star Burnap isn’t quite as incandescent, I like what the film does with this character, even if the whole bandit plot is both overcooked and unnecessary. Burnap, though, is undeniably compelling and charming, with his blandly handsome face and his floppy ‘90s boy idol hair. In other words, he’s the perfect person to play the love interest to a Disney Princess (and, while we’re at it, the original Prince Charming was very uninspiring in his own right).
And then, dear reader, there’s Gal Gadot.
I knew from the moment that I saw her in the trailers that this was going to be a performance that was going to be so bad it was good, and boy was I right. I honestly don’t know what Marc Webb gave her in terms of instruction, but it seems as if it was something along the lines of “be as awkwardly snide as possible.” The thing about it is that Gadot seems to actually be trying to be camp, or at least to be the sort of vamp that we associate with Disney villainy, and it’s precisely her earnestness in her approach–and her abysmal failure to come anywhere close to what she intends–that makes it the epitome of camp itself. Mark my words, students in film studies classes are going to be studying this performance for years to come. Her number, “All is Fair” is so gloriously bad that it’s good (for a brilliant analysis of this horrifying yet compelling spectacle, I recommend this article from Vulture). Suffice it to say that Gadot’s performance is one of the few things I genuinely enjoyed about this film.
I do have one gripe about the Evil Queen, though, and that’s the matter of her death. In the original film, you’ll recall, she flees up a steep cliff and attempts to crush the dwarfs with a large boulder, only for a lightning strike to send her plunging to her death. Here, her demise is somehow both more theatrical and less affecting, as she essentially dissolves after destroying her Magic Mirror. It’s an appropriate death, perhaps, given how much she has fetishized her own image, but I was left wanting more. The Disney films of old really excelled at showing their villains get punished, and one of the more unforgivable sins of the remakes is their caginess when it comes to giving their baddies a fitting send-off.
If Gadot’s performance is something close to and at times fully camp, the CGI dwarfs are something out of a nightmare. They are the very epitome of the uncanny valley, and any time I saw them on-screen I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t watching a horror movie. I still have no idea why the studio went in this particular direction, but I think that it’s going to be seen as one of the more egregious missteps in this movie’s notoriously troubled production. No matter how much it tries to humanize them, and no matter how charming they are supposed to be, their very uncanniness keeps them from ever seeming anything other than artificial and terrifying.
Is Snow White a good film? No. Does it make some meaningful updates and changes to a film that is undoubtedly dated? Also no. There was no way that any film, even a better version than we got, was ever going to be able to live up to let alone excel the status of the original, which was truly groundbreaking in terms of animated filmmaking. The fact that this version isn’t a total disaster is, I suppose, a good thing, though part of me hopes that it spells the beginning of the end of the live-action remake scourge.
That said, it’s an enjoyable enough film. I’m happy to admit that I wasn’t bored during it, and some of the original numbers are genuinely good. One can’t help but wish, though, that they were in a better movie.