There is one movie next year that I just don’t want to deal with, and it’s Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White. The movie is four months away and we’re already getting “this press tour is a mess” reporting on Snow White. In all fairness—it is a mess and that article I just linked to summarizes it. People are calling for boycotts, everyone is mad at everyone; no one is happy about the dwarfs; and racists continue to have a field day with a brown girl playing “Snow White”.
What if we just don’t this time? What if we all agree to just not? What if we collectively decide to not let a f-cking Disney movie make the hatred and division in the world that much worse? We can do it! It’s super easy! Because all of the off-camera stuff aside, Snow White looks like sh-t! Let’s just write it off now and save ourselves the angst!
I truly do not want to add to the Rachel Zegler pile-on, but this movie doesn’t look good. It looks like yet another boring Disney remake, the CGI dwarfs are gummy and weird—and NOT a solution to the problem of badly written characters from an underrepresented minority—and the lighting is off (so many of these shots have no direct light source! There are glow beams blasting everywhere like the sun is attacking! Someone heard the criticism of the dark and dreary Little Mermaid and said, “Increase glow beams by forty percent”!). But it also just…has no verve?
It just LOOKS like an exercise in brand management—which it is. But in the world of Big IP, it is still possible to make a good movie in and of itself. The live-action Cinderella put a fun spin on the story, bolstered by a great cast and genuine sweetness. The Jungle Book updated a film that hasn’t aged well; Pete’s Dragon, the best of the Disney live-action remakes, tells a truly magical tale by simply wiping the slate clean, pulling a functional narrative out of an original film that didn’t really work in the first place. And the other live-action remake due next year, How To Train Your Dragon, has, well, dragons and the lure of “real” dragon flight scenes.
Snow White is offering the terrifying CGI faces of the seven dwarfs (again, not a solution to the initial problem). I’m kind of into Gal Gadot’s Evil Queen, but then I think about Charlize Theron chewing scenery as the same character in Snow White and the Huntsman, and Theron is just so much better. I don’t think anyone is out-Evil Queening her any time soon. Speaking of Huntsman, though, while it’s far from a perfect film, at least it has an aesthetic. And direct light sources! That film actually looks good; the production design, the VFX, the costumes, the cinematography—the visuals are not the problem with that film.
But Snow White looks like another bland Disney update, a study in regurgitation, and on top of that, the aesthetic is bad. The script is co-written by Greta Gerwig and Secretary screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, maybe they’ll pull something out and surprise us all, but everything outside of the Evil Queen looks like bog standard Snow White stuff. At this point, I don’t think Disney is interested in deviating too far from the original script, except maybe to put a little girlboss polish on their princesses. Which is just another f-cking thing for people to be mad about, I can’t wait to hear about how empowered Snow White represents the death of the nuclear family or whatever the f-ck.
Which brings me back to my original point—what if we just sit this one out? The press tour is going to be a clusterf-ck, everyone’s been mad about this movie for two years already, that is not going to get better in Trump’s America, and it’s exhausting.
There are multiple Snow White remakes if that’s what you’re into, including one with Sigourney Weaver going nuts as the Evil Queen. We don’t HAVE to be angry about this Snow White, we can choose literally any other option. So let’s just don’t this time. Agreed?
