A useful live-action remake of the 1937 animated Disney classic? Or a naked attempt at IP protection and extension? Snow White joins Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Dumbo and The Lion King in the “bit of both” category. It is in other words a decent-enough run-through of an existing story, in a visual style we all recognise, with some star power in lead roles to convince stragglers to shell out all over again. Disney learned how to do this from the record companies, who for a while couldn’t believe their luck when everyone updated vinyl to CD, and then did it all over again with digital.
Snow Woke, though. Or Snow Not White Enough even. Rachel Zegler seems to have upset the sort of people who sit down to watch a movie with a Pantone chart. Her Colombian heritage irking some, sight unseen I’m guessing. Because she is by a long way the best thing about this adaptation sticking close to the original and using “fair” in the sense of “just” and “beautiful” rather than “pale”. Two out of three ain’t bad. Poor Snow White, reviled by an Evil Queen who wants to be the fairest in the land, winds up a refugee in the forest with the Seven Dwarfs, is fed a poison apple by an old hag (the Evil Queen in disguise) and is revived by the kiss of a gallant prince.
The only detail that’s changed is the prince. Do girls need princes in the 21st century? It’s been decided that they don’t. In fact Snow White and Andrew Burnap’s Jonathan – a Robin Hood-style outlaw of some sort – have a little bit of to and fro about the requirements of princesses in a more egalitarian age in a scene you’d describe as foreplay if there were any chemistry between Zegler and Burnap, which there isn’t.
He is miscast. Gal Gadot, as the Evil Queen, very much isn’t and is the other best thing in this reworking. Haughty of demeanour and kitted out in stratospherically tall crowns, Gadot was made for figure-hugging body suits topped with long, ominous capes (a shout to Sandy Powell’s excellent costume designs) and she gets properly stuck into her role. The other best best thing are the Frank Churchill and Larry Morey songs retained from the original – Heigh Ho, Whistle While You Work, Someday My Prince Will Come – which slot in next to some new ones by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who keep their end up. Waiting on a Wish is probably the standout of the new tunes.
How well the CG-animated dwarfs Dopey, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful and Doc are integrated into the live action, or is it the live action that’s integrated into the CG, with prosthetics and some old-school hand-drawn input? Either way, it’s a seamless whole.
It’s a charming film at its best when it’s closest to the 1937 source. But it lacks the darkness – Snow White lost in the forest in the original movie, for example – that gave the original its dynamic of light and shade. This renders everything a touch one-note. In spite of Zegler’s efforts to Julie Andrews everything along with bright clear diction and a big singing voice you cannot complain about, no matter how disposed against her your colour chart says you ought to be. That girl can sing (as I write she’s knocking them dead night after night in Evita in London’s West End).
Other departures – the faint feminism, the insistence on social justice and inclusivity (as if the original didn’t have that in spades) – are a touch tokenistic. But it doesn’t feel like director Marc Webb (whose 500 Days of Summer was a fairy tale gone wrong, if you like) and writer Erin Cressida Wilson (her other “girl in trouble” films include Secretary and The Girl on the Train) are particularly banging a drum. They are probably on a short leash in any case, all digressions from the original requiring endless approval meetings “upstairs”.
Er… it’s OK. The great bits are great, the bad bits aren’t that bad. There’s just not that much zing for all those bucks. As for all those thousands of one-star user ratings/reviews on the IMDb, all with suspiciously good grammar and the same writing style, someone has clearly been busy instructing an AI bot to magic up a campaign. I hope it whistled while it worked.
Snow White – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
