Snow White
I’m a sucker for a grand, over-the-top musical number in the town square. I just wish this one belonged to a better movie.
2025’s Snow White stumbles at the starting line and never quite regains its footing. It’s less a reinvention and more an elaborate exercise in overthinking a story that was barely there to begin with. The original 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs wasn’t a masterpiece of narrative depth — it was a groundbreaking achievement in animation that changed the industry forever. Its plot? Thin. Its themes? Even thinner. But it didn’t need to be more. It was magic because it was first.
This new version tries desperately to pull a moral from the bones of an 87-year-old cartoon fairy tale that never had one. Why do you have to drag the body of an 87-year-old film out of the casket for everyone to see? Adding lipstick to a corpse doesn’t make me connect to it any more than I did with its memories. Some stories just weren’t built to carry modern political allegory, and that’s okay. Snow White was never Joan of Arc, nor was she Fantine from Les Misérables, brought low by a cruel and indifferent world. She’s a kind soul who leads by example — that’s the whole point. You can expand on that, sure, but turning her into a symbol of rebellion feels hollow. It’s not revolutionary; it’s branding—-something made by the Mouse’s community rather than a love letter to a cherished fairy tale.
That’s not to say the film doesn’t try. I respect the effort to flesh out the characters — the prince, for example, is less “random dude who kisses corpses” and more swashbuckling rogue, channeling Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood. It’s a good look for him. The dynamic between him and Snow White has moments of charm, though the film seems to aim for Han Solo and Leia and lands closer to uninspired community theater. Close enough to recognize the shape, but stiff enough that you notice the seams.
There are seven dwarves in this film and each one of them looks terrible. They are teetering on scary to look at: rubbery, warped, painfully stale, and lifeless. I know I am not the first to say that the modern landscape for CGI is a bad place, and while I will say this isn’t the worst I’ve seen recently, this is not good. The dwarves themselves are written as well as they can be — they are charming and charismatic, just like in the original — but visually, they’re stuck somewhere between a cheap video game cutscene and a theme park animatronic that hasn’t been serviced in a decade.
Speaking of lifeless, unsettling things — Gal Gadot is bad in this. Truly, bafflingly bad. Before you accuse me of being some basement-dwelling misogynist raging against women in film, hear me out: a bad performance is a bad performance. Rachel Zegler, for all the off-screen controversy, is genuinely inspired and charismatic here. She brings a magnetic energy to the role, even if it’s not the direction I would have taken. Gadot, though, feels like she wandered in from a different, worse movie — stale, campy, and awkward in a film that’s otherwise trying to be sincere.
For all my cynicism, though, I can’t call this a dumb movie. It’s trying. It’s reaching for something more meaningful, even if it never quite grabs hold. And maybe that’s enough. I’m not the target audience, after all. If I were a seven-year-old girl watching this, maybe I’d see Snow White as a powerful, inspiring hero. Maybe I’d walk out feeling like I could change the world. And maybe that’s worth more than my grumbling about CGI and misfired revolutionary messages.
Sometimes, you need to get off your high horse and appreciate things for what they are; no one likes the cynic at Disneyland.