Let’s just get this out of the way.

Snow White is bad.

I’m not talking about the original Grimms’ Fairy Tale and I’m certainly not talking about the classic animated Disney film, which is one that always make me smile whenever I watch it.  For that matter, I’m also not talking about the majority of the Snow White remakes that have come out over the years.  (There’s been a surprisingly large amount.)

No, I’m talking about the live-action remake of the Disney animated film.  This the Snow White that finally came out earlier this year, after being delayed a countless amount of times.  If it wasn’t the SAG-AFTRA strike that delayed the film, it was the PR nightmares caused by Rachel Zegler’s inability to promote the film without hectoring everyone about her politics.  Even before that, the film was controversial because of a photo from the set that people interpreted to mean that the seven dwarves had been replaced by seven people of average size.  In Disney’s defense, it turned out that the people in the photo were not meant to be the Seven Dwarves.  Instead, the Seven Dwarves were created via CGI, which turned out to be an even worse solution.  (Though Peter Dinklage famously complained about Snow White being a “backwards story about seven dwarves living in a cave,” it’s also true that there are plenty of actors with dwarfism who probably would have appreciated the work.)

Whenever there’s a film that gets totally slammed online before it’s even released, there’s a part of me that always hopes that the film will prove the naysayers wrong and turn out to be a masterpiece.  I wanted Snow White to be good just because the online vitriol often seemed to go overboard.  For example, I may not have agreed with a lot of Rachel Zegler’s comments and I think it was selfish of her to drag her own personal politics into the promotion of a film that a lot of people worked on but I still think it’s important to be able to set aside those feelings when judging the actual film.  People who insist that they can only celebrate films made by people that they agree with are truly limiting themselves.

I was determined to ignore all of the bad publicity and watch the film with an open mind.  And the first few images made me smile.  The film opens with a bunch of animals opening up a storybook and that was such a cute image that I was briefly optimistic.  Unfortunately, the rest of the film is pretty bland.  Rachel Zegler can sing and Rachel Zegler can dance but, at least as far as this film is concerned, she has absolutely zero screen presence.  (For the record, I wasn’t really that impressed by her in West Side Story either.)  As a character, Zegler’s Snow White is boring.  The only person more boring than Zegler is Andrew Burnap as Jonathan, the bandit who is this film’s version of the original’s Prince.  They both give boring performances and they’re saddled with boring songs and neither actor seems to be sure how they should perform opposite the CGI dwarves.  (As for the CGI dwarves, they look like cartoons and they’re distracting in a way that could have been avoided by simply casting actual actors in the roles.)

I have to note that much of the online criticism of Snow White has been directed at Gal Gadot, who plays the Wicked Queen with the magic mirror.  The online film community insists that Gal Gadot is a bad actress despite all of the evidence to the contrary.  (Many of the people who insists on criticizing her now were the same people who swooned when she first played Wonder Woman.  Of course, that was before most of them went down the activist rabbit hole.)  Reading the criticism of Gadot, much of it seems to have less to do with Gadot’s performance and more to do with the fact that she’s from Israel.  If you’re that much of an anti-Semite that you’re going to judge someone’s performance based on where they were born, I don’t really know what to tell you.  Personally, I found Gadot to be one of the few bright spots of the film.  She understood the assignment and she thoroughly embraces the melodrama as the Wicked Queen.  Good for her.  It’s exactly the type of performance that the film needed.

I opened this review by saying that Snow White was bad and I stand by that.  That said, it’s main sin is that it’s so bland that it’s not even enjoyably bad.  After all the drama that went into the production, the film product is about as forgettable as a film can be.