Snow White (2025)

Someday my wince will come

Well, what are we to do with this? Do we pile on? Do we dig deep for silver linings? Do we assume you readers are unfamiliar with the avalanche of context preceding, and complications ensuing from, this remake — artistic, commercial, geopolitical? Or do we lay it all out dutifully like a briefing on megacorp IP dysfunction? Do we, instead, just shrug, say yeah, this thing is existentially cursed and never had a shot, and let you do your own googling if you want to know why this film caused a surge in searches for “do women have back hair”? Because any way you approach Snow White (2025), it’s less a movie than a piece of cultural wreckage, a hundred car pileup of bad timing and worse instincts.

My mindset on these so-called “live-action” remakes of Walt Disney Animation Studios classics is nuanced and, frankly, self-contradictory. I think they’re artistically bankrupt. I also get a little annoyed when other people get too worked up over them. Whether it’s reverence for the originals as sacrosanct cinematic texts or the sting of watching a once-vital creative studio reduced to brand management content, mining IP like it’s a crypto farm… I get the hate. But also: chill out. These are movies for kids. They are very easy to avoid. You can say no and go watch grown up movies. Their existence doesn’t preclude The Brutalist from getting made. Although… maybe I’m wrong and these are actively rotting the moviemaking landscape by sucking the financial gravity out of the room. Maybe Disney could peel off just 25% of this film’s reported $200+ million budget for a few mid-budget projects by people with something to say?

(Despite all my bellyaching about the bellyaching, I should confess… The last one of these I watched was Pinocchio, which I declared the worst film of 2022. And I stand by that. It’s a story about a wooden boy finding humanity that abruptly ends mid-climax with Jiminy Cricket throwing up his arms and going “Will he become a real boy? We’ll never know!” Come on, Zemeckis.)

But, yeah. Snow White is bad. It was always going to be bad. But I get no joy from punching down, and Snow White is as easy a target as they come. Rather than stewing in righteous anger like I did for The Electric State, I’m going to build upwards: my most hated element to my least hated, in the hopes of ending on the most cheerful note I can intellectually defend.

We start at the bottom with that which was unceremoniously dropped from the title: the dwarfs. They are terrible. These plasticky gremlins are a character design nightmare. Semi-human facial features mapped onto rubbery uncanny valley hell. All the cartoonish personality of the dwarfs in the 1937 original has been bleached. Dopey, once a silent slapstick cherub, has been transformed into an anxiety-ridden bully victim whose hangups can be cured with therapy talk. But Grumpy may have it worse — once a wonderful curmudgeon, now reduced to a generic whiner with no more personality or memorable moments than the rest. Look how they massacred my boy:

Just as vile as the dwarfs in the “please make it stop” department: Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. Her performance is a walking disaster of wrong decisions — a voice mangled with a bizarre fake accent affectation, a posture so stiff it could qualify as prop work, and an all-encompassing anti-aura. Remember how Ralph Fiennes made Voldemort kinda delightful without making the pure evil villain unnecessarily complicated or lapsing into full-on camp? He’s proof it can be done. Gadot does the opposite of all that. She doesn’t even know where the target is, let alone how to miss it in any fun-to-watch way. Her transformation into the hag should be the centerpiece of the film. Instead, it’s a limp nothing. Enchanted did this same beat better 18 years ago in 30 seconds of screentime.

Still squarely bad but not quite apocalyptic: the cinematography and animation. It all has that slick, over-processed, digital glaze that seems to be the default now for anything with a budget and render farms. On the plus side, at least it’s not brown. That counts for something. It’s colorful, occasionally obnoxiously so: Much of the film glows like a holiday display, but I’ll take that over the dim gray-brown soup prevalent in the MCU. Pretty much every CG creation is a nightmare, though, especially the animals. It’s aiming for living fairy tale, but it all clashes in an uncanny toxic sludge. Still, I’ll take garish misfire over funereal dullness any day. (See: My love of the Zombies movies.)

(I guess this movie has a director. It’s Marc Webb from the middle generation of Spider-Man movies and 500 Days of Summer. Nothing in here feels like “direction” in the sense I typically use the term. I hope he’s enjoying his yacht.)

Climbing the totem of tolerability, but only barely: the script. It’s bad, no question, and it changes a lot. But it’s bad in a way that at least feels intelligible. I understand what they’re going for: inject the 1937 Grimm-lite fairytale with 2025 storytelling norms and morality. It hits a couple of its targets, but it’s just deeply miscalibrated. Every worldbuilding dynamic and conflict-driver is overexplained and given lore. The tone is slathered in messages about slashing inequality, leading with kindness, and systemic reform, all of which are fine values, but ludicrous to squeeze into a movie borrowing the aesthetics and story structure of the original Snow White (most obnoxious are the recontextualizing of the words “fairest” and “White”). The princess herself is clearly “empowered,” but in the way that hits marks on a checklist. She’s assertive-ish. She makes choices-ish. Mostly, she’s just there to react, slightly more firmly than her 1937 counterpart.

Now we’re squarely in the “shrug” zone: the music. Pasek and Paul show up like clockwork with their formulaic anthem pack. None of the new songs are actively painful, but none are even a little memorable either. They’ve kept and reworked a couple of the classics (though notably sans “Someday My Prince Will Come”) and plugged in a few generic numbers into spots we’d expect them if this were a Disney Renaissance film: We’ve got the opening town song (“Good Things Grow”), the “I Want” song (“Waiting on a Wish”), the villain tune (“All Is Fair”), the training montage ditty (“Princess Problems”), and the love duet (“A Hand Meets a Hand”), and every one of them feels like a placeholder demo that nobody bothered to give a second pass. I didn’t hate them. I didn’t hum them. I guess that’s a step up from Wish, whose wordplay gave me migraines, and about on par with Moana 2.

(One quirk of the script is that it’s really invested in motif of two its songs: first of a “wish” from the “I Want” song, though I don’t think of the Snow White story having much to do wishing. And as soon as we hear “Princess Problems” the rest of the movie makes a lot of wordplay on those combo of words.)

Okay, some stuff I didn’t hate. Honestly, I think the decision to center a proper romance makes the story richer. The 1937 original may have treated love like a deus ex smoochima, but here we get goo-goo eyes, shared screen time, a little tension, and a little sweetness. Rachel Zegler and Andrew Burnap are charming enough performers — actual human beings acting — and they sell the whole “reluctant allies to affectionate freedom fighters” thing decently well. The story is still sloppily stitched together, but their dynamic is simple and earnest. If you’re going to invent a new character like Jonathan, this is how you justify him.

And now, the limited praise section. I kind of like Rachel Zegler in this. I can’t go so far as to call it a great or even actively good performance, but it’s definitely functional. It has advanced theater kid energy — she has pipes and poise. She holds her own against a green screen, some astonishingly unflattering costumes, and a haircut that was styled with a melon baller. She’s got real chemistry with the non-Gadot humans she interacts with (read: Burnap), and when she sings, the movie lifts a few inches up from its six-foot grave. She’s also extremely pretty and has big, expressive eyes. She does tend to funnel every not-strictly-positive emotion — fear, anger, longing — through the same underbite facial scrunch, but I chalk that up to teen sass. My prognosis for Zegler’s career: get cast in Damien Chazelle’s next movie, avoid IP for a while, and try to appear in more indies than Jenna Ortega for a calendar year.

So maybe it’s just my knee-jerk resistance to the “death of cinema” dirge that’s been humming around this movie, but I didn’t find Snow White quite as dispiriting as the internet promised. It’s not good, sure. But it’s also bad in a way that feels like a sick puppy. (A $200 million puppy.) At least it isn’t The Electric State, a film that made me question the entire endeavor of cinema. As long as Gal Gadot and the dwarves stayed off screen, I didn’t feel my soul shriveling. Compared to Pinocchio, that’s a win

Is It Good?

Not Good (2/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.