Movie Review: Disney's "Snow White" Might Be a Serviceable Live-Action Reimagining If Not for Its Major Dwarf Problem
With Disney’s Snow White live-action remake hitting theaters this coming weekend, Laughing Place was invited to an advance screening of the film. Below are my thoughts.
First things first: this new Snow White opens with a jarring-but-expected recontextualization of where the title character’s name comes from (hint: it’s no longer because of the color of her skin, as was the case in the original Brothers Grimm story and Walt Disney’s very first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from 1937), and if you can roll with that I think you’ll be mostly okay with the rest of the movie, with one glaring exception that turned me off almost completely… but we’ll get into that in a little bit. 2025’s Snow White stars Rachel Zegler (the very talented Maria from Steven Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story remake) as the protagonist and Wonder Woman’s Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, and for the first 20 minutes or so I found myself enjoying it more than I thought I would back when I first saw footage from the film at D23 Expo. It’s got nice production design and the new songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hanson, The Greatest Showman) are decent enough to be passable.
Gone are “I’m Wishing" and “Someday My Prince Will Come" (I get why, as Disney is doing its best to appeal to more modern-thinking audiences here) and in their place are fresh toe-tappers like the optimistic opening number “Good Things Grow," Snow White’s new “I Want" song “Waiting On a Wish," and the pretty funny “Princess Problems," which is sung by the love interest Jonathan (Andrew Burnap from Broadway’s Camelot), a charming Robin Hood-style thief who replaces the Prince from 1937. The Evil Queen even gets her own tune now– a haunting soliloquy called “All Is Fair" that provides the movie with one of its strongest musical-theater setpieces. And yeah, this all works fine, I thought, making the first act or so a good balance between old and new, with competent direction by The Amazing Spider-Man’s Marc Webb and fun choreography by La La Land’s Mandy Moore (no relation).
But the speedbump– and it’s a major one– comes when Snow White arrives at the home occupied by the seven dwarfs… at least that’s what they’re called in the title of the original; the D-word is never once uttered in this movie. I think we all know that the dwarfs, in their very concept, present as what would be called “problematic" these days, but you can’t really do Snow White without them, can you? And I think it’s extremely telling that in their final form, what the creative team came up with for the dwarfs in this film do not appear at all in any of the marketing materials (except in tiny background silhouettes) or promotional images provided to us by Disney. You can see them in the trailer, however, though that’s just a few glimpses of the horrors that await in the full feature. Look, I’m usually not squeamish at all, so what I’m saying is I don’t think I should have found myself turning my head away from the screen every time the dwarfs appeared. I genuinely found them hideous, residing squarely in the uncanny valley between CGI monstrosity and photoreal giant-headed freak show. In Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the dwarfs are cute and affable. You want to spend more time with them. The same is true when you encounter those characters in the Disney Parks. Here I just wanted them to run away and hide in the woods and never come back, to paraphrase a line from both versions.
I will go so far as to say that I was so repulsed by the dwarfs that it honestly ruined the rest of the movie for me. There are more songs, a romance that plays out, the whole poison apple thing (you know the story)-- oh, why was Gal Gadot’s “Old Hag" disguise accomplished using CGI makeup? That was weird too. There’s also the introduction of Jonathan’s merry men (sorry– merry peoples of assorted genders and lineage), one of which is an honest-to-goodness little person who gets a fair amount of screen time, so that’s something. The finale is unremarkable and the cast is doing their best the whole time, but really any goodwill this film earned from me at the top was instantly squandered the moment those dwarfs stepped into frame. And that has me thinking that maybe Peter Dinklage was right: if, like I said above, there’s really no good way to do the dwarfs, and Snow White can’t exist without them, then maybe don’t do Snow White? Ultimately I feel like the standout parts of this effort, not to mention the capable craftspeople who contributed to them, would have been far better served in an original film.
My grade: 2 out of 5 good potatoes.
Disney’s Snow White will be released into theaters nationwide this Friday, March 21st.