Disney’s Snow White

There’s magic to the groundbreaking 1937 animated classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It began with a storybook opening of its own accord, as if the fairy tale inside couldn’t wait to be recounted. For the live-action remake, that volume has been rebound: Now titled Disney’s Snow White, it’s forced open by a pair of CG woodland creatures so sickeningly cutesy that the infamously tacky artist Margaret Keane would turn her brush up at them.

Charmlessly directed by Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and with a new script by Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train), it keeps the barest narrative bones of the original script, with orphaned princess Snow White (Zegler) finding sanctuary with seven mystical miners as she flees her wicked stepmother (Gadot). Webb also pilfers the look of the original but dumps all the charm.

The “why mess with a classic?” question becomes a conundrum with the score. Which is more astounding? That Disney let Pasek and Paul, the team behind the widely loathed Dear Evan Hansen, write more songs? Or that even they could somehow massacre seemingly indestructible classics like “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work” with terrible new arrangements and asinine new lyrics?

The delivery does the songs no favors. Zegler (infinitely better in Spielberg’s West Side Story) pulls faces near voids filled in later by some of the worst CG this side of a Robert Zemeckis movie, before thrashing songs in the seemingly de rigueur American Idol “all power, no meaning” fashion. She’s still endlessly more tuneful than the monstrously autotuned Gadot, whose fifth-rate Eartha Kitt impression aims for pantomime and simply splats to Earth.

It's infuriating enough that Webb and Wilson ride not simply roughshod but seemingly blindfold through a classic, but other innocent fantasy classics are caught up as collateral damage. In an attempt to deepen the egalitarian politics of the new script, the seven dwarves are matched by seven actors who are also bandits and revolutionaries, and basically one giant away from being the Dread Pirate Roberts’ crew from The Princess Bride. They are led by poor Andrew Burnap as replacement Jonathan, a replacement for the prince and a less roguish version of Tangled’s Flynn Ryder. When he and Snow White warble blankly through their duet, a blatant knockoff in tone and presentation of that superior film’s swooningly romantic “I See the Light,” it's questionable whether Webb forgot which beloved Disney animated feature he was remaking. Wilson’s graceless script then reruns the closing act of the eminently forgettable Wish before the inevitable happy-ending dance routine that looks unfortunately like the village celebration from Midsommar.

That the audience for Ari Aster’s folk horror might find more pleasure in this Snow White than the average child is telling, since it’s almost impossible to work out who this version of the story is aimed at. Children will be bored, teens talked down to, and most adults will wonder where their Snow White is. What’s left – and the market sectors seem to have been targeted here – are the kind of theatre kids that have driven most audiences out of the theatre, and drag queens who will spoof Gadot’s wardrobe and her abysmal choreography (there’s one sequence in which I prayed the ghost of Bob Fosse would knock her down the stairs). It feels like everyone involved ignored that old wisdom of WWWD – what would Walt do? In 1956, when the original was on its second re-release, he mocked Hollywood for not understanding why he just made movies for kids. “I say, ‘Well, what’s wrong with anything that’s wonderful for the kids?’” He didn’t mean minors, but the inner child in everyone. Maybe Disney needs to remember that before they make the same live action remake mistakes again.