After significant postponements, the inevitable live remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (because Disney can’t leave well enough alone) is finally in theaters, simply titled Snow White. They don’t want you to be focusing on the likes of Sneezy and Dopey!
This is a movie they should’ve never touched. The original story simply doesn’t play well in modern times. No matter who you cast in a live-action remake of Snow White set in the same time period, the whole thing is going to look and sound stupid.
Rachel Zegler, who plays the title character, is a fine actress and a great singer, but her hairdo and getup in this version of Snow White is hilariously lame. The dress looks like something you’d grab off a rack in one of those Disneyland souvenir shops, and her hairdo, which is missing the iconic red ribbon from the animated film, looks like somebody at her salon did her bad. Real bad.
Are these petty complaints? Sure, but I cannot deny that the dress and hair made it hard for me to enjoy the film—and it’s not just the Snow White character. Everybody looks ridiculous, like they are in a spoof.
And these are the least of my gripes.
As for the dwarves (who do appear despite being left out of the marketing), they are presented here in CGI … bad, bad, bad CGI. They look monstrous, like somebody asked Chat GPT to make some Disney dwarves at the last minute. Dopey looks very much like Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine.
After some comments from Peter Dinklage a few years ago, “and the Seven Dwarves” got dropped from the movie title, and Disney almost seems to be hiding the characters. Hey, if you are that concerned about the dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, here’s a grand idea: Don’t do a live action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves! Yeah, you started filming it, but you could’ve sent it to the scrap heap before finishing it, just like Warner Bros. did with Batgirl. Disney can take that sort of financial knock.
Gal Gadot gives it her all as the Evil Queen, and you can’t help but feel bad for her. Her scenes are the most grounded in the film, and she’s got a nice singing voice. She’s having fun while we groan and roll our eyes. Zegler and Gadot’s decent voices can’t mask the fact that the new songs are conveyer-belt crappy confections.
The original Snow White used to scare the fucking shit out of me. Not because it was genuinely scary; I got creeped out by Snow White’s voice and was always turned off by rotoscoping (the art of painting over a live actor to create animated characters). Now I have this new one, with its freaky animated dwarves, to give me nightmares.
The whole thing ends with, of all things, a Diddy-style white party. Seriously, Disney: You’re so paranoid about old-timey mannerisms in your movie that you completely rewrite the narrative, and you then end it with everybody dancing around in all-white clothes in a manner that will have everybody thinking “Diddy white party”? How blind are you? Do you just want people to make fun of your movie at this point?
You can’t remake Snow White unless it’s a snarky, modern retelling, without the people with dwarfism, and with Amanda Bynes. (Actually, that didn’t work, either.) This Snow White is a grotesque, useless remake and money grab that is going to wind up being quite the opposite of a money grab: It’s a money pit, and Disney deserves to take its lumps.
That said, I’m still going to Disneyland in a couple of months. The blue milk in their Star Wars land is to die for.