SNOW WHITE (2025)
Tagline: The fairest of them all.
(Fairytale, Musical, CGI Animals Doing Backflips) [PG]
I'm sorry, my dear... did I frighten you?
In this slightly faithful adaptation of the SNOW WHITE story, Snow White is the daughter of a kind King and Queen whose lives and kingdom are disrupted by the death of the Queen. The King eventually marries another woman who becomes the new Queen and in the King's absence drives the kingdom into fear and darkness. When it becomes apparent she is no longer the fairest of them all, she attempts to have the young now largely forgotten princess Snow White killed.
Okay, I am going to start off with the bad here. First off, I love Gal Gadot. I will pretty much see any movie she's involved in. However, she was the wrong pick for this role. I thought she did a great job within her talent set, but it is very difficult to view her as anyone but the hero or at least the slightly good villain in any movie. Contrast her with Charlize Theron who has played several villains and has a knack for it. So taking Gal seriously as an "evil" person was a stretch for my brain. Having said that, it was far worse trying to get over Rachel Zegler as Snow White. Unlike some people, I don't care that she is Columbian at all. I only care that she can act and I really didn't get that here. I thought she was better in SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS, and this was kind of a reversion back to her weak performance in THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES. It was pretty weird to see her going from 0 to 10 emotionally especially when we never see that 10 where it would be expected. Zegler was most certainly miscast if she actually believed her own words that the original was "weird".
Another issue with this movie is that we have some crazy-looking CGI dwarfs and some crazy-looking CGI animals. If you are Disney and the whole point of the movie was to do a live-action film of an animated movie, then why does most of this movie look goofy and animated? If LIFE OF PI proved anything, it's that studios are perfectly capable of making CGI animals look pretty real. We don't get much of that here, although some of the animals looked better than others.
Now for the good. Even though I think Zegler was rough in this acting-wise, I thought she crushed it as a singer. She was also given great material, unlike Ariana Grande who had both bad material and bad singing in WICKED. I also loved Gal Gadot's singing parts and as corny as musicals can be, the lyrics were not corny.
The script overall was remarkably leftist agenda-free which I think a lot of people including myself were surprised by given Rachel Zegler's disastrous interviews regarding the movie's script. No, Zegler doesn't get saved by a prince in this one, but... Well, I don't want to give away any spoilers. I guess if you are really micro-scoping this thing out you can find some creepy ideas and all of that, but honestly, it's not really any different than the "be kind" message we got from Disney in the 1937 version. There are actually several Biblical ideas in this thing which is likely only because the writers didn't know, or they did and hoped no one would notice. Proverbs 29:4 is a good start.
Overall the other reviews on this seem like a giant bag of cats and are mostly negative, but I liked this one, and if you read my reviews a lot you know I can't stand so-called social justice garbage. This movie is not that. I will also say there was no reason to give this movie a PG rating especially given that the original was approved for all audiences and Disney's DVD release came with a G rating.
This one gets a 5 out of 7.
In this slightly faithful adaptation of the SNOW WHITE story, Snow White is the daughter of a kind King and Queen whose lives and kingdom are disrupted by the death of the Queen. The King eventually marries another woman who becomes the new Queen and in the King's absence drives the kingdom into fear and darkness. When it becomes apparent she is no longer the fairest of them all, she attempts to have the young now largely forgotten princess Snow White killed.
Okay, I am going to start off with the bad here. First off, I love Gal Gadot. I will pretty much see any movie she's involved in. However, she was the wrong pick for this role. I thought she did a great job within her talent set, but it is very difficult to view her as anyone but the hero or at least the slightly good villain in any movie. Contrast her with Charlize Theron who has played several villains and has a knack for it. So taking Gal seriously as an "evil" person was a stretch for my brain. Having said that, it was far worse trying to get over Rachel Zegler as Snow White. Unlike some people, I don't care that she is Columbian at all. I only care that she can act and I really didn't get that here. I thought she was better in SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS, and this was kind of a reversion back to her weak performance in THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES. It was pretty weird to see her going from 0 to 10 emotionally especially when we never see that 10 where it would be expected. Zegler was most certainly miscast if she actually believed her own words that the original was "weird".
Another issue with this movie is that we have some crazy-looking CGI dwarfs and some crazy-looking CGI animals. If you are Disney and the whole point of the movie was to do a live-action film of an animated movie, then why does most of this movie look goofy and animated? If LIFE OF PI proved anything, it's that studios are perfectly capable of making CGI animals look pretty real. We don't get much of that here, although some of the animals looked better than others.
Now for the good. Even though I think Zegler was rough in this acting-wise, I thought she crushed it as a singer. She was also given great material, unlike Ariana Grande who had both bad material and bad singing in WICKED. I also loved Gal Gadot's singing parts and as corny as musicals can be, the lyrics were not corny.
The script overall was remarkably leftist agenda-free which I think a lot of people including myself were surprised by given Rachel Zegler's disastrous interviews regarding the movie's script. No, Zegler doesn't get saved by a prince in this one, but... Well, I don't want to give away any spoilers. I guess if you are really micro-scoping this thing out you can find some creepy ideas and all of that, but honestly, it's not really any different than the "be kind" message we got from Disney in the 1937 version. There are actually several Biblical ideas in this thing which is likely only because the writers didn't know, or they did and hoped no one would notice. Proverbs 29:4 is a good start.
Overall the other reviews on this seem like a giant bag of cats and are mostly negative, but I liked this one, and if you read my reviews a lot you know I can't stand so-called social justice garbage. This movie is not that. I will also say there was no reason to give this movie a PG rating especially given that the original was approved for all audiences and Disney's DVD release came with a G rating.
This one gets a 5 out of 7.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF WALT DISNEY PICTURES AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
Comments
Post a Comment