“Snow White” Is An Uninspiring Remake

“Snow White,” Disney’s latest live-action barrel scraping, has been on the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of bad press over the preceding weeks and months. An ill-advised dip into the audience reviews for the movie on IMDb would reveal tens of thousands of identical one-star reviews, all seemingly written by bots or AI in an effort to discredit the film as one of the worst films put to screen since the dawn of cinema. These reviews are unfair and oftentimes based on nothing more than mob mentality, and they are a firm reminder of just how toxic some corners of the internet can be.

Much of that ire seems directed at Disney for reasons unrelated to the narrative elements of the film. These nonsense complaints, often surrounding the casting of lead actress Rachel Zegler, are presumably all written by people who haven’t seen the film, as anyone made to sit through the 109 minutes would know that there are countless actual reasons to dislike this movie.

To list what works about “Snow White” is a short task but one that feels necessary. At the core of it all is Rachel Zegler, who manages to salvage a three-star performance out of sub-one-star material. Even when everything around her seems held together by nothing but aggressive corporate oversight, she’s able to inject a hint of something that resembles artistic expression. She deserves far better than what she’s given and in an ideal world would have flourished in something closer in quality to 2017’s “Beauty and the Beast.”

Beyond Zegler, there’s little to keep “Snow White” from occupying the bottom rung of the live-action Disney ranking. The setting looks bland and unrealistic – there's rarely a scene where the movie doesn’t look like actors on a poorly lit soundstage. Costumes look unconvincing at best and like cheap fancy dress at worst, with designs somehow failing to replicate the original or feel unique simultaneously. It’s visually unappealing from the word go and only gets worse from there.

The controversy surrounding the seven dwarfs, who were quietly dropped from the title of the film long before release, is a long and tiring story that benefits no one. What resulted is a near-total overhaul of their appearance and role in the story, leading to some of the ugliest, most revolting CGI characters ever put to screen. Uncanny doesn’t even begin to cover how dreadful they look; it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to suggest that they’re potentially unsuitable for younger children entirely. They never feel like they occupy the same space as their live-action counterparts, and that’s all before we get into their role in the story.

The most glaring issue with “Snow White” stems from the fact that it’s trying to recreate details of a film from 1937 while still appealing to a 2025 audience. The original “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” hasn’t aged brilliantly, not just in terms of social progress but in how a story is told onscreen. Attempting to balance the key elements of a 90-year-old story for children with modern narrative standards leaves a final product that feels both incredibly dated and deeply cynical.

By trying to preserve the sincerity of “true love’s kiss” between exposition dumps and explanations for everything from Snow White’s hairstyle to why Dopey doesn’t talk, the final product somehow achieves the double bogey of having no faith in the material it’s trying to celebrate. It’s not an easy task to obfuscate the evil queen’s outdated obsession with beauty in a story so reliant on that jealousy, but “Snow White” attempts it regardless, failing spectacularly in the process.

Speaking of the evil queen, Gal Gadot delivers an all-time villain performance, though likely not in the way she expected. She is comically bad in the role, often eliciting laughter from an audience of mostly children and bored parents whenever she attempts a serious tone. She brings nothing to an already one-dimensional role, and when paired with one of the movie’s few stars who can act, she feels wholly out of place.

“Snow White” is a movie cursed by its own inevitability. When Disney began remaking its animated back catalogue a decade ago, it was clear that “Snow White,” the first feature that started it all, would be somewhere along the production line. On top of being a shallow copy of the original, it’s also an artless, soulless rework of every remake that came before. Every character, including Snow White, comes across as reimagined or invented by a committee of people determined to appeal to the widest, least defined audience imaginable.

Ultimately, all that leaves is a bad movie without a hint of identity; the only thing memorable is what doesn’t work, and there’s so much there that it’s barely notable for that. Songs are forgotten before they’ve even finished, and despite a budget of well over $200 million, it’s the cheapest a Disney product has ever felt.