I’ve been really mixed on the trend of Disney live action remakes. Some of them can add fresh context to the story and its characters and give you something altogether exciting and different (Cruella, The Little Mermaid), and some can feel like lifeless exoskeletons of the film the audience knows and loves (The Lion King, Alice in Wonderland). Director Marc Webb’s beleaguered adaptation of the one that started it all, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, after a troubled behind the scenes production and lots of confounding controversy, is finally hitting theaters. And to be honest, I was worried about this one. I was rooting for it, because I’m a fan of star Rachel Zegler and I was looking forward to the new songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. However, my reaction today is a mixed one. Disney’s Snow White is not the utter debacle I was expecting, but it’s going to take a lot more than true love’s kiss to shake this one awake.

Do I need to explain the plot summary of Snow White? Surely you’ve seen a version of this story before. Well, if you haven’t, the film follows Snow White (Zegler), a princess whose mother has died and whose father has been exiled from the kingdom he once reigned over. She is left with her stepmother, the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot), who is obsessed with being ‘the fairest of them all,’ so much so that she hatches a plot to kill her stepdaughter. Banished into the woods, Snow White wanders into the house belonging to the Seven Dwarfs (never called that in the film – we’ll get to that) and encounters the handsome Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who devise a plan to help her overthrow the Evil Queen’s reign of terror. 

Disney’s Snow White is a decidedly mixed bag and while there are things about Webb’s film that feel like fresh, welcomed additions to the classic lore, there are several other aspects that feel fundamentally misguided. The Thing Disney Has Been Doing Lately is to give an indie filmmaker who has had some critical buzz and/or awards clout an enormous budget and see how it goes. It’s a trend among all of the Marvel/Disney/Lucasfilm projects and it’s trickled out into being something other studios do. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Marc Webb has done this before – he made The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, for Sony. Those were received mixed-to-poorly at the time, but have gained a cult following. And his Snow White unfortunately feels like a film made by algorithms and data-mining services and not by people. There are so many glaring problems here that should have been easily fixable, and these are problems that drag the whole movie down and rob it of its magic.

Rachel Zegler is a star. We knew this when we saw her in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake and saw it again in 2023’s The Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. And she’s once again quite lovely here. She truly embodies the Disney Princess archetype and she’s got a soaring, luminous singing voice, even if her wig looks terrible. Her chemistry with Andrew Burnap, not playing Prince Charming, but a new character who is actually a character, is the film’s central highlight. The romance between Snow White and the not-Prince is given more time to build and the viewer really does root for them. As the actors playing the live-action princes go, Burnap is not my favorite but he’s got just enough charm to get the job done. And he gets to sing this time! A duet between the two near the film’s third act is probably the film’s strongest moment.

Gal Gadot, on the other hand, feels deeply miscast. I was enjoying her Evil Queen for a while, but it quickly became clear Gadot is playing one note here and that’s it. She’s not giving you shades of anything more rooted in any kind of recognizable humanity, and she’s less exciting to watch as the film goes on. But her costumes are magnificent. And she does an okay job with her new villain song. It’s one of the few new songs that kind of works. But the nearly distracting level of autotune present in that song is reminiscent of Emma Watson in the Beauty and the Beast remake. My friend who I went with turned to me at a point and said they should have cast Lady Gaga as the Evil Queen. Now there’s an idea. I spent much of Gadot’s screentime thinking about other actresses who would’ve been better suited to this than she was.

The film’s central problem is the character design of the dwarves. They’re never called that in the movie, in what seems like an effort to be politically correct, after the actor Peter Dinklage went on a well-documented rant about Disney’s decision to remake this film, which he considered offensive and dated. He made a good point, highlighting the hypocrisy of Disney patting itself on the back for casting a Latina actress as Snow White, while still doing this story again, which is offensive to a community of people. Instead of casting actors with dwarfism, we have these unsightly CGI not-quite-human uncanny valley nightmare fuel creatures that are downright horrifying. The way their humanity is stripped from them in this strange depiction feels horrendously problematic. Dopey has a legit character arc this time, but you can’t take a single moment with the dwarf characters seriously because all that’s staring back at you onscreen is these hideous creatures that give you supreme ick.

And while I’m a big Pasek and Paul fan, the songs here only work intermittently. The songs in La La Land feel nothing like the songs in Dear Evan Hansen (which I will defend until my dying breath), which feel nothing like the songs in The Greatest Showman, which feel nothing like their new songs in Disney’s Aladdin remake. However, a good 80% of the new music here feels like The Greatest Showman B-sides. Zegler’s I-want song is nice, as is her duet with Burnap, and so is the Queen’s villain song, even if Gadot can’t really sing it. But the rest here vary from nothing special to aggressively not good. The real problem with the music is that we have a million reprises and songs that keep going and going and never really end. Even in the aforementioned I-want song, Waiting on a Wish, there’s no big climactic crescendo, no big note for Zegler to hold and give the audience a showstopping moment. It kind of just limps to the finish line, and that’s kind of an ongoing theme with this film.

So overall, I’m unfortunately very mixed on this new Snow White. There are many aspects of it that work well enough that you can’t dismiss it entirely, but it fumbles the bag in a number of frustrating ways that leave you feeling let down. Rachel Zegler is giving her all here, and while she’s onscreen the film can feel fully alive. But the film around her is visually flat, musically underwhelming and clumsily executed, plagued by a series of baffling creative decisions. I’m hoping families with young children – who this film is for, after all, have a better time with this, and I hope it empowers a generation of young girls into the idea that you can be the princess and you can also be the hero of the story. But maybe when they get older they can watch a better movie that delivers that message more effectively.