Movie Thoughts: Snow White (2025)

• Released: March 12, 2025
• Directed by: Marc Webb
• Running time: 1h 49min
• Rating 2/5

Synopsis

Princess Snow White must unite her divided people in order to stand up to the Evil Queen.

My Thoughts

Everyone and their grandma seems to hate this movie. And yeah, I'm not gonna lie, they're pretty much right. Okay, the insane amount of hate I've seen directed towards this movie I don't completely understand (it's bad, but not that terrible, either), but I do see where people are coming from when they say this is a bad film.

I just overall didn't enjoy this one. I didn't have high hopes going in, but as always I am willing to be positively surprised and go in with an open mind, even with Disney live-action remakes that get a bad rep. But this one just didn't work for me.

I'd be lying if I said this is the worst of the live-action remakes Disney has done in recent years. I hate their 2022 Pinocchio movie more, for example. The Mulan remake is pretty bad as well. But yeah, this one ain't great either and probably belongs on near the bottom of the list of live action remakes. I just don't think it should be on the very bottom.

The story takes the basic Snow White tale but it also tries to make it epic and make Snow White more proactive. Which okay, is something I can get behind. But in the end I just don't think the way they went about it worked. I felt constantly emotionally detached from the movie and characters. The dwarfs aside from Doc and Grumpy and Dopey aren't all that distinct (I legit couldn't tell who was who half the time); the love interest is boring as fuck and has no chemistry with Snow White; and Snow White herself, while not unlikable, is just, well, bland. Very, very bland. I don't mind her being more proactive and assertive in this version of the story, but the character they ended up making with her just felt so flat and uninteresting. 

Honestly I think I just preferred the characters of the original animated Snow White to how bland everything is here. And I do have to admit, I'm not even a huge fan of the original movie this is based on. But I like the characters and writing better there than the bland storytelling and characters they're giving us here.

The dwarfs also look horribly uncanny valley. I legit don't get why they didn't just cast actual people with dwarfism to play the roles. Because what they ended up doing here, brr. These designs just scream uncanny valley and just look wrong and like they don't belong in this universe. I think they either should've gone more cartoon-y with these designs, or just made them realistic (or literally just cast actual little people). Because right now the designs are too cartoon-y to feel real, but too realistic to feel charming and expressive and recognizable like their drawn counterparts are. 

Honestly I think, if we're talking about the CGI designs in this movie, they did do it rather well on one element of the film: the animals. I don't know why they decided to have pretty much all animals be animated, but their designs do look like a nice balance of realism and cartoon-y. They're never really uncanny valley, they just have a good, well-balanced look to them. Not so much with the dwarfs. 

As for the rest of the movie, like I said, it's just bland. Visually it's bland (even if I like the animal designs, nothing about them really stands out), musically it's bland, character-wise it's bland. It's just forgettable.

I think I also really have to bring up that I didn't like the acting of the Evil Queen. Something about her delivery and how she sung just didn't work for me and felt quite bad at times honestly.

Another kind of funny aspect in this movie is that they unintentionally gave Snow White way more chemistry with Dopey than her actual love interest. You can tell they're trying to get the audience to buy the Snow White X Jonathan ship, but her few interactions with Dopey just feel way more relaxed and natural and less forced. This is definitely unintentional, but I do find it kinda funny in a bad way.

But yeah...not a good movie. I can't even get angry at it, it's so forgettable. I'm not against the idea of a different take on the Snow White story, but this did a bad job at it.