Snow White (2025) is directed by Marc Webb and written by Erin Cressida Wilson. It stars Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap, Andrew Barth Feldman, Tituss Burgess, Martin Klebba, Jason Kravits, George Salazar, Jeremy Swift, Andy Grotelueschen, Ansu Kabia, and Patrick Page. This modern retelling of the classic Grimms’ fairy tale follows Princess Snow White (Zegler) after her father’s throne is usurped by her cruel stepmother, aka The Evil Queen (Gadot). On the run, she joins forces with seven dysfunctional dwarves, and, soon after, a group of bandit rebels. Together, they hatch a plan to stop The Evil Queen and deliver the throne back to its rightful owner.

Zegler’s casting as the titular princess makes sense, considering the film’s many musical numbers. The film has countless flaws, but her singing isn’t one of them. Beyond the musical numbers, however, she fails to do anything particularly interesting or new with the character. The whimsical nature of her animated counterpart is almost entirely muted, instead opting for a more serious, independent version of the character. There’s a sense that the writers intend to recontextualize the character/story as a kind of capable feminist hero. 

The problem is that, besides eventually being saved by the kiss of Prince Charming (which I’d argue is quite clearly more about the general power of love), there’s little about the character that was ever outright anti-feminist. I’m not saying this modern perspective on the character is unwelcome, but its execution here is ham-fisted and superfluous. This shift in attitude often feels like the film’s main justification for retelling this story, but it never succeeds in making these events feel truly different. It relegates the character to spending most of her time making multiple groan-worthy, sanctimonious speeches about being a good person. There’s nothing wrong with the message, per se, but it equates to someone suggesting that a thirsty person should drink water, as if that isn’t already obvious.

As The Evil Queen, Gal Gadot’s hilariously over-the-top performance should easily earn her a nomination at this year’s Razzies. She contorts her face in ways that suggest she’s a living cartoon, and adds more slimy emphasis to her lines than Ian McDiarmid as Emperor Palpatine. It’s truly bad acting, but the kind of bad acting that fails so remarkably, it’s tough not to be engrossed. Oftentimes, being extraordinarily bad is much more interesting than being normally bad. She goes for it and falls flat on her face, but I have to respect such an all-in effort. 

What confused me most about the film is how it handles its dwarf characters. It’s unclear whether the decision to make the dwarves CGI was intended to simply save money or to avoid controversy from real short-statured people, but either way, it’s a dumbfounding choice. It feels as if the filmmakers think short people are akin to fictional beings. It’s no different than making a film where all of the obese people are CGI. What’s next? Are we going to start making all the black people CGI? How about all the women? Anyone over the age of 45? Why TF not? It wouldn’t be ideal to have someone of typical height play these characters, but even that’d still maintain the reality that these are real human beings. What is even more perplexing is that, halfway through the film, we’re introduced to another dwarf character who, for some reason, isn’t CGI. What’s the difference between him and the other 7 dwarves? I have no idea, and I’m pretty sure the filmmakers don’t either. 

The heavy use of CGI visuals works a lot better here than in previous Disney ‘live action’ remakes. Besides the horrendous-looking dwarves, the film is more visually engaging than I was expecting. Compared to the two Lion King remakes, it’s nice that the live-action promise isn’t just a complete lie, but it’s still much too reliant on CGI. What’s the point of a live-action adaptation if, other than the actors, everything is still animated? Not to mention, it’s a clear downgrade from the original animated film, which was released almost a century ago. 

This lack of improvement, and more often, regression, also applies to the film’s music. The new takes on the classic songs only make them sound generic, while the new additions are so forgettable that I can’t recall their tunes one day later. This heavily contributes to the film’s runtime, which at 108 minutes feels punishingly long. 

From the opening scene, it’s clear that anyone above the age of 8 is going to be in for a difficult watch. The uncomfortably gooshy voiceover narration immediately overexplains the setup for a story most audiences are already familiar with. This insult to our intelligence is bad enough, but the narrator’s concerningly happy tone suggests that his world is suffering from the same fate as the humans in P1URIBUS (2025-). Not to mention, the exposition dump here evokes a lazy, 1st-grader version of Game of Thrones. I guess every fantasy film in 2025 has to have a rebellion and a “larger universe,” for some reason. 

Overall, this is yet another lazy, disposable, somewhat insulting attempt by Disney to remake one of their animated classics in “live action” form. It fails to improve upon the original animated film in any way and, in most cases, feels like a clear regression. It’s a hodgepodge of unexplainable creative choices, unoriginal storytelling, and generic themes. I do appreciate that the film at least tries to do something different with the story, but this is the rare case where I think I’d rather have gotten a shot-for-shot remake. If Disney plans to continue with this remake trend (which seems to be the case), I just hope that a piece of crap like this will at least prompt them to raise the bar on quality control. It could be a lot worse, but if this isn’t the pinnacle of ‘bad filmmaking’ in 2025, I don’t know what is. F