British film critics have mostly panned Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White, while US reviewers have been somewhat more positive.
Chief film critic for The Times, Kevin Maher, said: “Believe the anti-hype, it’s that bad”, although Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney called the film “mostly captivating”.
Its release has faced several issues throughout its production, from alleged disagreements between cast members, to debates over representation of the seven dwarfs, and the casting of Rachel Zegler in the lead role.
Reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film, which will be released globally on Friday, an initial critics’ score of just 47%.
The mostly good
US reviewer Rooney describes director Marc Webb’s work a “vibrant retelling” with a “smart script” from Erin Cressida Wilson.
But he isn’t a fan of the way the film handles the seven dwarfs.
The debate around the dwarves began in 2022, when Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage, who has has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, described the decision to retell the story of “seven dwarfs living in a cave” as “backward”.
Disney used computer-generated characters in the remake to “avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film”, but some other actors with dwarfism were concerned this decision would prevent them from getting work in the future.
Rooney said: “Although the talented voice cast gives the characters humour and distinctive personalities, their CGI renderings are a bit creepy, and less photorealistic than many of the cute woodland creatures that flock around Snow White.”
Pete Hammond wrote in Deadline that the film is “just fine”, adding: “It manages to make a thoroughly decent reboot from a genuine, never-out-of-circulation classic and make it fresh and relevant again for contemporary audiences.”
He added the musical film has “dazzling dance numbers” while the title character of Snow White “is played to perfection by Rachel Zegler”.
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called the film “one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature”.
He felt that the CGI dwarfs “bring the movie to life”, adding they have “catchy personalities and comically expressive mottled-clay faces”.
Gleiberman concluded the film is “lighter, more frolicsome, less lead-footed than such clomping live-action Disney remakes as Alice in Wonderland and Beauty and the Beast”.
Robbie Collins from The Telegraph gave the film a respectable three stars.
“Once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up,” he said.
He also described the performances of the songs Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work as “stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed”.
The not so good
Most British publications haven’t been so complimentary about the film, with the Daily Mail’s Brian Viner giving the film two stars.
“Snow White the movie has its charms, and dozens of cute CGI forest animals, but on the whole it is a painfully muddle-headed affair,” he says.
He says Zegler “has oodles of talent” but “Webb’s film only intermittently allows her to sparkle”.
Disney’s decision to cast Zegler, a Latina actress, as a character deemed to have skin “as white as snow” prompted some controversy – it was part of a drive by Disney to cast a more diverse range of actors to play updated versions of some classic characters.
Zegler also made headlines after she made critical comments about the original animated film.
“The original cartoon came out in 1937, and very evidently so,” Zegler said in 2022.
“There’s a big focus [in the original] on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird! So we didn’t do that this time.”
Zegler also said the original film was “extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power”, adding: “People are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White, where it’s like, yeah, it is – because it needed that.”
Her relationship with co-star Gal Gadot has also been under scrutiny, with rumours that promotional work for the film was scaled back because of their opposing views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Zegler has used social media to post pro-Palestine material, whereas Israeli citizen Gadot served in her country’s army for two years.
However, others have said rumours of a rift are misguided, noting Gadot and Zegler have appeared publicly together on several occasions, including when they presented an award together at the Academy Awards.
Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian gave the film one star, calling it an “exhaustingly awful reboot”.
He describes the costume design for Snow White as a “supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders”, adding: “Those otherwise estimable performers Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot (The Evil Queen) are forced to go through the motions, and they give the dullest performances of their lives”.
The Times’s Maher referenced the pared-down European premiere for the film, which took place at a castle in northern Spain last week, while the Los Angeles launch was held on Saturday without most of the usual ranks of press on the red carpet.
He added: “The new tunes, much like Zegler’s performance, are watery and ineffectual, while the dramatic jeopardy is non-existent.
“It’s hard not to see this as anything other than a crisis point for Disney, a studio that used to make flawless cinematic stories but now infantilises global audiences with sanctimonious life lessons culled from the corpses of their own murdered movies”.
Tickets for the film, which reportedly cost more than $270m (£217m) to make, have only been put on presale in the last two weeks, relatively late for a big Disney film.
Clarisse Loughrey from The Independent gave it one star, declaring that “Rachel Zegler deserves better than the lazy, visually repellent Snow White”.
“What’s most disheartening about it all is how predictable Disney’s choices have become. With Snow White, they’ve finessed their formula – do the bare minimum to make a film, then simply slap a bunch of cutesy CGI animals all over it and hope no one notices,” she concluded.
