Snow White — like all live-action remakes — doesn't deserve to exist

It is with a heavy sigh that I break the news: Snow White, the latest in Disney's line of return-to-the-vault remakes, has crash-landed in theatres. Starring Rachel Zegler as the titular princess and Gal Gadot doing her best impression of Angelina Jolie's Maleficent, it has already earned enough bad press — both for its clunky storyline and its newspaper's worth of controversies around its characters and actors.

But here I am, ready to pile on. Still, there is an impulse to approach film criticism with an open mind and minimal bias. So, let me reveal mine. 

I believe the virus of live-action Disney remakes is, at best, lazy. At worst, they're evil.

They are ugly, garish, reductive; in their attempts to evoke the feeling of hand-drawn animation, they either bump up the saturation and contrast to an eye-bleaching level, or stuff themselves with uncanny valley CGI sidekicks to poorly ape the magic of animation. 

The very existence of these remakes serves to devalue animated movies, tacitly assuming that live action is somehow an upgrade — while staying vague enough to attract the incredibly broad audience they require to remain economically viable.

And because they're so often based on older narratives meant for audiences of a different time, they demand awkward plot updates and character recasts. Then, the ham-fisted results often incite hatred against their stars, instead of the industry executives who actually deserve the backlash.

Other times, they shift plots to avoid the most problematic remnants of Disney's surprisingly racist and tone-deaf past, while undercutting the themes and worlds that originally rested on them: Removing Dumbo's Jim Crow-crows and the underage drinking aspect of its Pink Elephants on Parade song made financial sense for a 2019 remake looking to suction dollars from protective parents' pockets. It also led to a sanitized product with little personality, redeeming qualities or even reason to exist. 

So when presented with this bevy of obstacles, one would think the solution would be simple: Instead of a new Snow White, make something original instead. 

But predictably, Snow White falls prey to literally every one of these stumbling blocks, while offering little to nothing in context or story to justify obscuring the memory of the 1937 production.

Who's the fairest?

Here, the princess Snow White lives in a fantasy village that quickly establishes the updated theme in the musical's opening song: "a kingdom for the free and the fair," filled with "fields and the fruits that they bear" and a "beautiful abundance we share." 

In terms of reworked, progressive Disney themes, this one is far from the worst; it intentionally conflates "fair" — as in kind-hearted — with the Evil Queen's "fairest-of-them-all" rhetoric, putting into question what really makes someone worthy of adulation.

It's what's inside that counts, this Snow White aims to teach, while stumbling through the weirdly political subtext of land rights, colonization and fascism that its opening number is ecstatic to introduce, but never fully unties.

From there, the story echoes the one we all know and love: She is cast from the kingdom, stumbles on her magical forest friends, flirts with a local hunk — until a left-turn ending, veering away from the damsel-in-distress finale (which Zegler has consistently lambasted, to considerable controversy of her own).

Where it starts to falter is the changes made to remove old messages — including the origin of Snow White's name. It is now inspired by a snowstorm she survived as a child, instead of her skin being "as white as snow" from the original. While it works fine in the context of the movie itself, Zegler, who is not white, has had to suffer through the type of insults and attacks that besieged Black actress Halle Bailey after she was cast in The Little Mermaid. 

More notably within the plot is the handling of the "seven dwarfs," who, while lopped off of the title, are left in the story itself. The characters' inclusion drew criticism — including from Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage — that Disney attempted to fend off by saying they are "magical creatures," not portrayals of people with dwarfism.

And though the film included actors with dwarfism (like Martin Klebba, who voices Grumpy), visually, the final characters are an ambiguous digital analogue — CGI monstrosities that blur the line between realism and fantasy. In animation, everything is fantastical. In live action, fantastical things look creepy.

Dopey changes

Nowhere is that proven more than whenever the unnervingly unreal Dopey mugs bashfully at the camera, breaking any immersion Snow White had previously built up. 

Which is an interesting enough change in itself. That character has evolved from, essentially, a trip-prone clown into a shyly smiling, Dobby-esque metaphor for Snow White's own burgeoning self-confidence. Our new Dopey isn't a "dope" at all, we're reassured; he's just a flower waiting to bloom. But as he develops from a bashful loner into Snow White's trusted confidante, it does raise the question — why is the other "magical creature," Bashful, here at all?

It's a hyper-specific complaint to an already questionable side character's lesser flaw, but it shows the pitfalls Snow White stumbles into while trying to "fix" its story. Why change the entire exposition and finale to reinforce Snow White's agency over her own destiny, only to still be saved by a man who kisses her while she's unconscious? Why shift the theme from true love to a community overthrowing despotism, only to keep a monarchical ruler? 

And speaking of despots, why centre your film on the manipulative power of a terrifying villain, only to cast a performer who here proves she can't act her way out from underneath her costume jewelry, let alone out of a paper bag?

In most other regards, Snow White is fine enough, and — aside from Gadot's comically bad villain song — boasts surprisingly good music for a modern movie musical. But it is also firmly in the pantheon of films that chip away at our culture simply by existing, stupidly forcing a story designed for animation into live action where it can't help but showcase the shortcomings of one while invalidating the other. 

So, should you see it? If you have kids you want to take to the theatre, sure — it's hardly Disney's worst live-action remake.

But should Snow White exist at all? To quote Once Upon A Time's version of the Evil Queen: "Evil isn't born, it is made." And with soul-crushing remake after remake, Disney is building up quite a case for that argument.