Forget Woke Snow White. Disney's Remake Is More Like Socialist Snow White.
The long-delayed remake is a flat, limp, relentlessly boring film, strung along by bland, uninspiring songs.
If you've heard anything about Disney's new live-action Snow White remake, it's probably that it's woke, that star Rachel Zegler is a "DEI princess," and that the movie caters to cringe left identitarianism. The long-in-the-works movie, most of which was shot in 2022, has been embroiled in online controversy for years, and most of the complaints were made by people who hadn't seen the movie.
But I have. And the movie is indeed a trainwreck. The problem isn't that it's woke. It's that it's awful—and lamely, bluntly socialist.
The remake's big idea was to twist the idea of the word "fair." See, in earlier versions of Snow White, an evil queen asks a magic mirror, "Who is the fairest of them all?" It's always the queen, until one day the mirror responds that it's actually her stepdaughter, the Princess Snow White. The question, "who is the fairest," in other words, has always been a question about beauty. But in the remake, there's something else going on. The movie goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the queen isn't fair because she's not a socialist. I am not kidding.
The film doesn't quite use that word. But early in the film, Snow White encounters a handsome thief named Jonathan in the castle. Jonathan is the leader of a group of bandits who live in the woods and survive by stealing food. He feels justified in stealing because he and other ordinary people have very little while the queen has a lot and she won't share.
This isn't just a generic lesson in being kind. Later, after Snow White takes up with seven computer-animated dwarfs in the forest, one of the dwarfs explains that the bandits in the woods are "only there because of the queen's greedy economic policies, which forced them there into a liminal space where ethics are harder to define." This might not be a precise word-for-word quote—the line gets spat out so fast I am not certain I transcribed it exactly right—but it's pretty close. This is a movie about how stealing is justified because of the evil queen's economic policies. She's not fair, you see, because her privilege and selfishness have impoverished ordinary people. It's Snow White by way of Occupy Wall Street.
Jonathan and Snow White continue to flirt through a song called "Princess Problems," which is mostly about how Snow White needs to understand her own privilege. Sure, she might have lost both her parents and has been essentially turned into a maid by her evil stepmother. But she's literally a princess who lives in a castle. Wow, elite. I was almost surprised when there wasn't a couplet about intersectionality—but in fairness, it's difficult to rhyme.
That song also nods to the queen's evil worldview. She's "poisoned all of us into believing it's everyone for themselves." The entire movie is like this, as if the screenplay was given a write-through by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). It's less a magical fairy tale than a cloying, clunky disquisition against Ayn Rand.
Reader, I shrugged.
I am not against political ideas and metaphors in films, even political ideas I strongly disagree with, so long as the movie in question is entertaining, interesting, clever, or amusing in some way.
But Disney's Snow White remake is none of those things. Politics aside, it's a flat, limp, relentlessly boring film, strung along by bland, uninspiring songs. The production budget reportedly soared past $250 million, yet somehow the film manages to look very cheap. The sets look like cardboard stands painted for a community theater play—or, when filled out by animation, like video game levels where you're supposed to roam around performing fetch quests. The computer-animated dwarfs have been awkwardly rendered to look like three-dimensional, not-quite-lifelike versions of the characters in the 1937 cartoon; their creepy figures plumb the depths of the uncanny valley.
The whole movie looks fake and ugly. In some ways, that's the remake's greatest betrayal of its source material. Disney's 1937 animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs remains a beloved classic nearly a century after its release, partly because it was a technical marvel and partly because it was flat-out gorgeous—each frame beautifully animated, every visual detail lovingly attended to.
But there's no love or beauty in this limp, desperate remake—nothing to admire or appreciate. No matter how you define it, it's not the fairest of them all.
