Snow White (2025) – Review

“SNOW WHITE”

Snow White is the latest in Disney’s live action remakes that has been part of their initiative to reinforce the brand that helped build them. In this case, we have director Marc Webb at the helm, who is famous for directing 500 Days of Summer and The Amazing Spider-Man movies. 

And oh boy, has it been a bit of a weird one to go into. This was a review that really made me nervous about anything I said, considering that the discourse around this film has been unbelievably toxic, if not helped by the fact that both of its leads seemed to have pissed off both sides of the political spectrum. 

So going into this I want to be perfectly clear, people know where my politics stand and their opinion on the previous Disney movies. But in case it needs to be repeated, I’m incredibly left-wing and I haven’t really enjoyed any of the previous Disney Live action remakes. 

Now that is cleaned up, even without the toxic discourse around the film, I wasn’t excited to see this film. This is because of several reasons: I haven’t really enjoyed any of the live action remakes, I think at best I liked Jungle Book, but I’m also not a massive fan of the original cartoon. I had it on VHS as a kid, but it’s not as if I think it’s one of my personal favourites. I think it’s an interesting moment in animation and I can see why it blew people’s minds when it came out and why it blew Disney into the powerhouse it became, but there’s of course parts of it that didn’t age well- and I’m not just talking about the most obvious one. 

That being said, I didn’t watch Snow White in preparation for seeing this remake, despite the fact that I have a Disney Plus account, but I just had a lot on my plate and I wanted an excuse to not watch a film that I don’t really rate that much. I think the original is fine, just perfectly fine. Keep in mind though, that opinion is from the last time I saw it. 

If you’re not aware of the Snow White story, it’s pretty much the same deal as the original one. Snow White (Rachel Zegler) is chased into the woods by the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot) after a magic mirror tells her she is no longer the most beautiful in the kingdom and orders her to be killed. Snow White then takes refuge in the house of 7 little men (called Dwarves in the original) who are apparently called Miners internally in the film- probably because of the fact that it’s considered derogatory to call short people dwarves in spite of it being in a fantasy context… As such, I’ll continue to call them the Miners in this review just to be safe! Now, instead of a Prince, it is a rebel named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) who helms the forces fighting the queen.

Let’s get one thing straight, if any film could have done with an expansion on its story, Snow White is probably one of them. To get it out of the way, they do go down the way of explaining Rachel Zegler’s casting by saying that she was born in a snowstorm and was named so due to her survival. But this is a thing that a lot of the Disney remakes do, which is to over-explain everything. I will say, I do think that some of the ideas had merit to them, but I don’t feel like Snow White works.

Let’s go over things that do work. The costume design is fantastic, I really really liked the costume and sets in this film, I think they did a fantastic job of it. The music score is also pretty good! We’ll come back to the songs themselves. I think some of the performances are alright, Rachel Zegler is doing a pretty good job and I think her casting was a decent idea considering that there are a lot more musical numbers in this one so it was a good idea to get an actress who actually can sing and doesn’t need much in the way of auto tune.

That being said, I think she has been badly written in this movie. While they try to make Snow White a bit more proactive this time, I think that this sums up another issue that this movie has- which is that I’m not sure if it even wants to be a remake of the original. They don’t do anything incredibly stupid like adding in extra ways that the queen tries to kill Snow White from the original fairytale, I always felt that that never made much sense and I’m glad the original film cut that, and some of the more problematic elements are gone. They kind of try to copy Snow White and the Huntsman- which doesn’t really work when you’re trying to make it mix in with the original, and it felt like these two ideas were clashing.

I saw a pretty good video essay on YouTube which basically pointed out that Snow White is basically a supporting character in the original story and original movie, and that the Miners are the ones that get the most character development. The film could have easily been rewritten to give more character development to Snow White, but it’s kind of at the expense of the Miners. I don’t understand why they’re in this movie, with the exception of really Dopey of all characters, they don’t really get much to do! I suppose Doc gets more of a moment other than just being a leader, but I think they’re just there because they’re meant to be. 

There was a lot of talk after a paparazzi photo that these characters had been written out of the movie and they would have 7 magical creatures take their place, and after there was backlash from this, Disney put them put back in and that’s why characters that were rendered with motion capture and digital animation don’t look very good- the uncanny valley effect here is real, especially when they have to interact with Snow White. 

There have been members of the production that have come forward to deny this to say that the Miners were always planned to be in the movie, but based on how they were written, you could have fooled me, because they feel like an afterthought! This film does feel like tow ideas that are clashing with one another, and again, it feels like it has to over explain everything like why the land is suddenly worse because of the Evil Queen.

I get a sense that the only reason they kept certain elements in was to play safe and meet expectations.

There are way too many new songs. Whistle While You Work and Hi Ho are still here, but at times I was asking to just take a break from the songs! There are a couple that I couldn’t stand- if anyone ever plays Princess Problems to me, I will have a violent outburst, because it really had no reason to be there.

The rebels don’t do much of anything. I found it weird that it wasn’t appropriate to cast a short actor to play the Miners, there is a short actor playing one of the rebels! I think that just highlights the weird decisions in the making of this film.

I will say that I am not just getting politically sick of Gal Gadot- I want to make it very clear that I don’t agree with her politics, but she is wooden as hell in this! It doesn’t help the fact that the song she is given is crap. She is really underacting in this movie, this to me felt like it was a massive paycheck for her. 

The thing that really did it for me was the climax of the movie. Because they wanted to put more emphasis on Snow White, they changed the ending. Without spoiling it, it’s similar to the original but goes in a different direction, and it felt really weak, like they couldn’t think of a better way to end it.

I found it ironic that Disney of all people would make a film where the climax sort of leads to ‘capitalism is bad’. You can’t claim to fight the establishment when you are the establishment itself- that’s just weird mixed messaging.

I really don’t want to hate this film since it’s a lot of really awful people putting out bad faith criticism on it, I will say that I really dislike this film from a viewer’s perspective. I really didn’t enjoy it at all. I don’t think that this is the worst of the Disney remakes, but it’s not good either. This really didn’t need to be a massive musical despite the fact that you have a lead actress that can sing- it felt like two movies that were fighting for control. But God, this film was really a drag to get through!