At The Movies: Disney’s live-action Snow White is a lacklustre update of a classic

Snow White (PG)

109 minutes, opens on March 20
★★☆☆☆

The story: In this live-action remake of the Disney classic Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937), Snow White (Rachel Zegler) is the beautiful princess loved by her people. Her father, the king, remarries the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). The new queen, jealous of Snow White’s beauty, orders the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to take her stepdaughter to the woods to kill her.

It is hard to think of a good reason for this remake to exist. While parts of the 1937 animation have aged poorly, this surface-level do-over does the bare minimum in fixes, while adding little in fresh artistic achievement or entertainment value.

Jabs thrown at previous Disney remakes apply here. The new film carries the narrative timidity of The Lion King (2019) and the uncanny-valley weirdness of The Little Mermaid (2023) while providing little by way of visual magic, aside from the costumes.

It must be said that the 1937 Walt Disney project is a little misogynistic in its depiction of an inert princess, the first in a line of Disney princesses. She waits to be saved, first by woodland creatures, then by dwarfs and later by the Prince. Her tormentor is another female stereotype, the beauty-obsessed evil stepmother.

While Zegler’s Snow White does not become Lara Croft, she is shown to be more physically adept at saving herself. This is especially after the appearance of Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), a newly created Robin Hood character who steals from the queen to help the oppressed folk.

The story does its best to hide the fact that its villain is a jealous stepmother by emphasising her tyrannical nature rather than her pettiness. That plot line cries out for a larger-than-life comic actress – her character name is Evil Queen, for goodness’ sake.

But strangely, Gadot, someone not known for being strong in either drama or comedy, was asked to play her. The actress is out of her depth, especially as she is pitted against the more agile Zegler.

Director Marc Webb made the Marvel superhero film The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its sequel (2014) feel fresh and fun. In this project, he seems to have been hobbled by a need to pay homage.

Three songs from the original make a comeback (Heigh-Ho, Whistle While You Work, The Silly Song) here. A fourth, Someday My Prince Will Come, is heard as an instrumental melody because of script changes that have made the princess less of a wait-er and more of a do-er.

The new songs – performed by Zegler, Gadot, Burnap and others in the cast – are fine. But once the old songs make an appearance, viewers will feel themselves yanked out of the new movie and transported into the old one.

Instead of a funny female villain, the film’s jokes come courtesy of a troupe of tumbling, bumbling dwarfs.

The producers solved the problem of a dwarf cast – an ethically problematic addition in 2025 if ever there was one – by using the computer-created likenesses of Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy and Doc. Looking not quite human and not quite animated, these mildly creepy creatures are yet another distraction in a film filled with them.

Hot take: This soulless remake does the bare minimum to modernise the original, with the result that it feels like a quaint, anachronistic curiosity right out of the gate.