Snow White (2025) Review
2/10
A princess’s stepmother keeps her as a servant. She escapes into a forest, seven miners take her in, and she eventually returns to reclaim a kingdom. The songs are partly the 1937 ones and partly new.
The 2 is for a film that arrives exhausted. Every decision in it appears to have been made in response to an objection. That produces a picture that’s continuously defending itself and never doing anything. I came away irritated more than bored. The 1937 original is frightening and strange, and this version sands off both qualities while keeping the title and the songs to sell tickets. Every scene reads like a memo answering a complaint, and after two hours of that I wanted somebody, anybody, to make a decision and live with it.
What it’s useful for is watching a production try to satisfy several incompatible audiences at once. That’s a problem any writer working in a visible position will eventually face in a smaller form.
The Committee Is Visible
The film has to be the 1937 film, because that’s the property. It also has to not be the 1937 film, because a princess waiting to be rescued isn’t a story a studio will release now. The solution is to make her a leader, give her a political objective, retain the songs, retain the apple, retain the prince as a bandit, retain the dwarfs as something else, and keep the title. Every one of those is a response to a constraint and none is a decision about what the film is.
The result is a protagonist with two incompatible functions. She’s the passive figure the plot requires, because the plot is still the 1937 plot, and she’s the active leader the modern version requires, and the film alternates between them scene by scene.
The clearest symptom is the poisoned apple. The story needs her to eat it and a competent leader wouldn’t, so the film has her eat it anyway and hopes nobody notices the contradiction.
The apple scene made me laugh at the wrong moment. The film spends an hour telling me she’s a shrewd leader and then has her bite the obvious poison because the 1937 plot says so. I’d have rewritten the apple or cut it.
The prince is the same problem from the other end. He can’t rescue her, because that’s the objection, and the plot requires somebody to wake her, so he’s rewritten as a bandit leader who does it anyway while the film looks elsewhere.
A character can’t be passive and active at the same time, and a plot built for one won’t accommodate the other. If you’re modernizing an old story, change the plot. Keeping the structure and changing the protagonist produces a person who behaves inconsistently for reasons the reader can feel and not name. Every decision made in response to an objection is a decision made by somebody who’s not you. A work assembled that way has no position.
When a project has incompatible requirements, the answer is to pick one and lose the other audience. Attempting both loses everybody.
The Dwarfs Problem
Peter Dinklage objected publicly to the original story being remade at all, on the grounds that it’s a regressive depiction. The production responded by replacing the dwarfs with digital creatures.
That decision then drew criticism from performers with dwarfism who lost seven roles in a major production. That’s a real and specific grievance about employment. Both positions are coherent and they’re incompatible, and the production was going to be faulted whichever it chose.
What it chose is the worst available option on craft grounds. The digital characters are neither convincing nor stylized, they occupy an uncanny middle, and they’re on screen for a very large portion of the film. A third option existed and nobody took it. Rewrite them entirely, as the 2012 Mirror Mirror did with bandits, and make them people instead of a problem to be managed. What the film chose instead is visible in every scene they appear in. Seven digital characters with rendered faces, performing songs, interacting with a live actress, occupying the emotional center of the middle hour, and reading as neither real nor designed.
The dwarfs are where the film gets hard to sit through. I kept staring at those rendered faces waiting for them to look like anything at all, and they never did. Mirror Mirror solved this in 2012, and I can’t understand why nobody here looked at it.
Zegler and Gadot
Rachel Zegler can sing extremely well and is doing the best work available inside the material. The songs are the only sequences where the film has any life.
She also spent two years in a public argument about the film’s politics, largely conducted on social media. That became the dominant story about the production long before release. That’s worth naming plainly instead of avoiding. The discourse was disproportionate, a great deal of it was organized and hostile, and none of that made the film better or worse than it is.
The useful observation for anybody working publicly is about proportion. A handful of remarks across two years generated more coverage than the film itself received, and no amount of later work has changed what the first page of search results shows about her name, and it’s not at all obvious that anything she does from here on ever will.
Gal Gadot is miscast in a way the film can’t survive. The Evil Queen needs real menace and vanity operating together, and Gadot plays neither, delivering the threats flatly and the songs without the required control. The Queen is the role that makes this story work. In 1937 she’s the reason the film is frightening, and a version where she’s not frightening has removed its own engine.
Gadot is the bigger problem for me. A Snow White with a limp Queen is a haunted house with the lights on, and I never believed for a second that this woman would hurt anyone.
An antagonist who’s not frightening in a story built on fear has removed the element everything depends on. Cast and write for that before anything else. The protagonist can be uncertain, the plot can be thin, and a threatening antagonist will make up for both.
Public argument about a work isn’t a substitute for the work and it does replace it in the record. Anything you say about your own book will be read by more people than read the book. That’s a real constraint on anybody working visibly and the only reliable answer is to say less and finish the next thing.
What Two Hundred and Seventy Million Buys
The reported budget places this among the most expensive films ever made, and it took roughly two hundred and five million worldwide. That’s a heavy loss before marketing.
The money isn’t visible on screen in any useful way. The forest is digital, the castle is digital, the creatures are digital, the crowds are digital, and the overall look is closer to a rendering than to a place.
That’s a choice with a cost. An actor standing in a real forest is reacting to cold, light and uneven ground, an actor on a volume stage is reacting to a wall, and audiences sense the difference long before they can put it into words. I felt it in every outdoor scene, and it’s a big part of why the film never felt alive to me.
Compare what Pete’s Dragon did with a fraction of that. Real forest, real weather, one creature, and a result that still looks better ten years later.
The film was delayed, reshot, recut, and released with a reduced premiere and minimal press. That’s a studio’s way of announcing that it knows. The premiere itself is the detail worth keeping. No red carpet, no press line, a small photo call in Spain, which for a film of this size and this title is an institution deciding to get the release over with as quietly as possible.
It Ended the Program
Within months of release, several announced remakes were shelved, reassigned or removed from schedules, and the strategy that had run since 2010 stopped being the default.
That’s why this film is more significant than its quality warrants. A fifteen-year commercial program ended because one entry failed clearly enough that the arithmetic stopped working. What’s worth understanding is that criticism didn’t end it. People had been making these arguments about photorealism and explanation since 2017, and the only thing that changed anything was two hundred and seventy million dollars returning two hundred and five.
The same is true in publishing and in every other business built on formula. A form ends when it stops paying, and the people who predicted it years earlier receive no credit and no apology.
The vampire boom, the dystopian young adult boom and the adult coloring book boom all ended the same way. Nobody was persuaded. A large title underperformed badly enough that the acquisitions stopped.
Being right early is worth nothing commercially and it’s worth a great deal personally. Keep the record of what you said and when, and don’t expect anybody to check it. The market corrects on numbers and never on argument.
When a formula ends, the capacity to do something else has usually atrophied. That’s the cost and it falls on the people who had no say in the formula.
For your own work: the time to develop the next thing is while the current thing is still paying, because after it stops you’ll have neither the money nor the standing to experiment.
Should you watch Snow White?
No. I’m giving it a 2 because nothing in it is allowed to be itself: the heroine flips between passive and active by the scene, the Queen has no menace, seven digital creatures swallow the middle hour, and the bill came to two hundred and seventy million dollars. The only part I’d sit through again is Zegler singing, and the soundtrack costs a lot less than the film did.
