Review of Snow White (d. Marc Webb, 2025)
Not far into the new Snow White, Disney’s latest adaptation of the fairy tale made famous by the Brothers Grimm some two centuries ago, the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot, woefully miscast) rebuffs an impassioned plea from the titular heroine (Rachel Zegler, worthy of far better than this film or the undue backlash she’s endured while promoting it). The Queen’s subjects—including her stepdaughter Snow (or is it Ms. White?), who toils as a scullery maid in the royal palace—suffer ignobly under a regime of iron-fisted austerity. Snow remembers better days long past: couldn’t the Queen just spare “something small, something sweet even” to lift downtrodden spirits, like the apple pies she used to bake with her now long-deceased birth parents? “I really don’t remember you being this opinionated,” the Queen huffs, a line that gracelessly highlights the bottomless hauteur that foretells her character’s inevitable downfall. It’s one that has also accrued a certain metatextual resonance, though this is doubtlessly as unintended as it is wholly unwelcome for The House of Mouse. For a film beset by controversies since it was greenlit almost a decade ago, such a line feels almost like the studio talking down to a viewing public suddenly eager to pour sand in the gears of their tried-and-true blockbuster model. So why has this Snow White resonated for all the wrong reasons?
Perhaps it’s the sheer ubiquity of this material: this marks the third live-action rendition of this story in the past fifteen years, to say nothing of Disney’s own Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the studio’s very first foray into hand-drawn animation. To be fair, neither Mirror Mirror (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) nor its 2016 sequel The Huntsman: Winter’s War were very good, but each at least attempted to do justice to the Grimm’s potent conflating of the natural and the moral. Conversely, this latest version seems to take our collective knowledge of its allure as a given. The film’s opening fifteen minutes race through an entire other movie’s worth of exposition, providing glimpses of the kingdom’s collapse following the death of Snow’s mother and her father’s subsequent remarriage to the duplicitous Evil Queen. The princess’s status as a symbol of unsullied, elemental purity –“skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair as black as ebony,” as the story goes—amidst this decline is never sufficiently articulated, leaving a rickety foundation that can only underserve the story proper. When the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) is called upon by the Queen to kill the rabble-rousing princess, shouldn’t his ultimate refusal—rendered so indelibly among the sun-dappled birches of the animated original—bear the heavy weight of a crisis of conscience? More damningly, shouldn’t the magic mirror’s all-knowing commitment to the many meanings of what (and who) is “fair” impart the instructive, epiphanic moral logic of a fable? This perfunctory approach to narrative mythology prevents the film from ever establishing an animating sense of enchantment.
Frankly, though, that’s been a feature of Disney’s recent spate of live-action remakes, of which this is just the most recent. The studio prefers the term “reimagining” for these ventures, a term that implies a wedding of thoughtful revisionism and craft that has rarely been evident onscreen. One of the more significant reimaginings here is given away by the shortened title: where are the seven, ahem, miners of short stature and disparate deportments? Now full-CGI creations, these roles were initially meant to be played by actors with dwarfism, before Peter Dinklage—probably the most well-known actor from the little people (LP) community—voiced his disgust at this proposition. His concern was that stories like Snow White deny LP personhood by coding them as magical creatures—and, given, their supporting role in Snow’s journey, subservient ones, too. Though Dinklage certainly doesn’t speak for everyone in the community on this issue, Disney’s subsequent reconceiving of these characters in response to his critique indicates they considered it a fair one. There are other pointed changes: George Appleby, an LP actor who served as Dinklage’s stunt double on Game of Thrones, plays an archer whose proficiency with a bow makes him an essential member of the human-led resistance against the Queen’s tyranny. That he’s provided a love interest played by a woman of color (Dujonna Gift, credited as “Maple”) whose given exactly zero lines of dialogue should give a sense of how substantive most of director Marc Webb and Co’s progressive-minded updates are.
This spirit of self-defeating reinvention is most apparent with the alterations made to Snow herself. She’s given more agency, a lot less to clean, and ostensible political motivations. There’s a sense that the Queen’s selfishness is not just a personal problem but a public one, too, and that we should view her treatment of Snow as synecdochic of how she treats the rest of the kingdom. Does it need to be said that this is never expanded upon? When order is finally restored, Snow leads the white-clad kingdom’s residents in a reprise of the anthem (did I also mention it’s still a musical?) sung in the film’s prologue. It’s refrain is “where the good things grow,” an almost tautological recapitulation of the Grimm’s vision of human redemption through a reconciliation with nature. Yet this fine rhetorical flourish is rendered almost meaningless here: the kingdom isn’t agrarian, so it’s not clear what they’re growing, and worse, it’s not clear at all what they do that’s good. We’re left with a narrative that asks us to root for the overthrow of a greedy autocrat that takes the form of a benign, IP-milking, all-ages product funded by a multinational conglomerate. To be clear, this sort of dissonance has long been the clarion call of blockbuster filmmaking the world over. But perhaps some stories just resist the kind of reimagining Disney is so heavily invested in these days. They might do well to heed the Evil Queen, who offers Snow some advice before potentially provoking changes far beyond her control: “go back to your wealth.”
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Reviewed 4/4/2025