By Seth Lukas Hynes
Snow White
Starring Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot and Andrew Burnap
PG
3.75/5
Mining the Uncanny Valley
The latest – and one of the better – Disney live-action remakes, Snow White is a sweet, uplifting yet visually uneven watch.
Snow White (Rachel Zegler), the gentle princess of a fantasy kingdom, has her lands usurped by an Evil Queen (Gal Gadot).
Zegler is a delight as Snow White: noble, irrepressibly kind and with an angelic voice in the musical numbers.
Gadot exudes a deadly elegance as the Evil Queen, though she has precious little screen-time and her singing is somewhat poor in her big villain song.
The plot does an admirable job of empowering Snow White as a plucky leader and not just a girl to be rescued, and the songs – old and new – are fun and lively.
Snow White’s plot proceeds with little urgency and feels slightly padded, largely due to a barely-characterised bandit group who contribute almost nothing to the plot.
While the film’s art direction is vibrant and often stunning, many of the environments have an artificial aura (as do the helpful forest critters).
The iconic dwarves’ expressive but imperfect CGI stands out compared to the living, breathing humans alongside them (and the 2012 film Snow White and The Huntsman took the more convincing — if controversial — approach of digitally splicing the real faces of actors such as Bob Hoskins onto dwarf actors’ bodies).
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to the Uncanny Valley, and while Snow White’s charm and emotional weight got me past the distracting CGI for the most part, this may be a bigger obstacle for some viewers.
Playing in most Victorian cinemas, the Snow White remake will enchant young kids and satisfy their parents, but I also heartily recommend the Snow White-inspired 2012 Spanish silent film Blancanieves.
