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Have we discussed the live-action remake of 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs since it came out?
In an effort to drum up business my local theater is running a promotion that includes free movie tickets for spending money at local bars and restaurants. While it's not something I would've spent my own money on, I elected to use one of my free movie vouchers to see the new Snow White because I was curious, and wanted to form my own opinion of it.
I expect most readers of this thread have at least a passing familiarity with the various controversies surrounding this production and more knowledgeable people than I have already done the business and Culture-war narrative side of things to death. So I'm going to focus on the on-screen product.
As a movie Snow White is solidly "Mid". Not good, but not terrible. The writing, acting, and set-peices are all passable. The humor is bland and inoffensive, and the songs are mostly forgettable. Gal Godot may have the dramatic range of an Electric SUV on 5% charge, but "Sultry Femme Fatale" is well within that range, and she seems to be having fun vamping it up (As is often the case the "villain song" is one of the better ones). To Rachel Ziegler's credit she sings well and serves adequately in the role of "pretty princess" / "coquettish ingenue" coming across as substantially less "Girlbossey" than I had expected given her off-screen persona.
The movie wastes no time establishing it's left wing-wing politics. The opening song and dance number is essentially all about how wonderful life is when people give according to their ability and receive according to their need. The word-play between "fair" as in "light-skinned" or "pleasing to the eye" and "fair" as in "fair use" "fair trade" and a "fair contest" is a recurring leitmotif throughout the script and it gets established in this bit.
Because Disney princesses are not allowed to have a mother the good queen falls ill and dies at the end of the song which is when a wild Gal Godot appears. She is a beautiful noblewoman from a far-off land across the sea whose people, covet wealth, power, and beauty above all else, and have magical powers. The King (Snow White's dad) is naturally smitten and immediately marries Gal Godot presumably because she is wealthy, powerful, and looks like Gal Godot.
In her new position as Queen, Snow White's stepmother immediately begins to subtly corrupt the Realm and remake it in her own harder and more covetous image (think Pottersville versus Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life). In case you haven't picked up on it yet, Snow White's canonical origin story in this movie is about a virtuous and happy left-wing government being subverted and taken over from within by an evil Jewish woman through a combination of sex-appeal, blood magic, and propaganda.
We skip forward an indeterminate number of years, Snow White has been kept cloistered in the castle "because it is not safe". The evil queen Gal Godot has been sowing fear about a nebulous threat on the southern border as an excuse to get Snow White's Dad out of the picture and to crack down on dissent. (I wonder what that was intended as an allegory for?) Snow White catches a thief named Johnathan played by Handsome McStrongJaw raiding the Castle's pantry, and he informs her that life outside the castle walls is not all sunshine and adorable woodland creatures. Snow White's response is to inform the Queen. You see, if only the queen knew what was going on she would put a stop to it. Johnathan is arrested and put to death, but Snow White helps him escape the castle because this is a Disney movie and he is the designated love-interest.
Snow White is getting a bit too uppity and too "fair" for her own good so Gal Godot convinces the one black guy in the palace guard to take Snow White out to the woods and kill her by getting all up in the guard's personal space and offering him anything he wants. Black guy takes Snow White out to the woods to kill her, but he gets cold-feet and decides to tell Snow White about the whole murder plot because she was nice to him and asked him how his day was going.
Snow White flees into the enchanted wood where she meets the Seven AI-Generated Dwarves we are all familiar with from the 1937 original. After some hijinks and another musical number the Dwarves inform her that the enchanted wood is also home to Seven Bandits. A troupe of erstwhile actors who are plotting to overthrow Gal Godot and have recently been joined by our "prince of thieves" Johnathan. Snow White sets out to find them and a bunch of stuff happens without any real rhyme or reason. There is singing, there is dancing, there is peril, but none of it really effects the plot or evokes a feeling.
The proverbial "final battle" of the movie is Snow White and the Seven Bandits leading a protest march against Gal Godot that ends with the Townspeople and Palace Guards
all drinking a pepsiturning on the queen and reinstating the socialist order from the opening musical number.In conclusion, for what is otherwise a very bland and boring movie in the watching there seems to be a lot going on. And im curious to hear other people's thoughts on it.
I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...
I just think the original story's random and uninteresting.
Queen becomes jealous of princess. Tries to murder her. Fails. Queen tricks princess into eating poison apple. Princess falls into coma. Queen is chased up cliff and then falls to death due to lightning strike (lol). Prince stumbles upon comatose princess and kisses her, awakening her from her coma. The end.
Throw a magic mirror and seven dwarfs in there because why not.
I simply don't care. The general audience probably doesn't either. Not sure why the remake was greenlit.
That is because it doesn't resonate with you. The story does resonate for young, attractive women. Young attractive women face a lot of bitterness and resentment from older, less attractive women. The story is effectively a warning to young women and a lesson for them. If you are being backstabbed by other women, withdraw from social games and wait until you snag a high quality man.
It also teaches be humble, be kind to those around you etc even if you are an attractive women. Don't let that attractiveness turn you into a monster.
To add to this, have some similar stories from other countries:
From Scotland, Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree, in which an oddly-named queen decides to kill her equally oddly-named daughter after a magic fish tells her that her daughter now surpasses her in beauty. Unusually for these sorts of stories, the king/father is not totally useless, and he fakes the daughter's death while also secretly shipping her off to marry a foreign prince. This lie holds for a while, but eventually the queen goes back to the magic fish to verify that she's now the most beautiful woman alive, the fish blabs the truth, and she goes off to the foreign prince's castle with murderous intent, and after a number of shenanigans gets tricked into drinking her own poison.
From Italy, Bella Venezia, in which a female innkeeper constantly asks customers to agree that she's the most beautiful woman in the world, until one day they start saying her daughter is more beautiful, so she locks her daughter away, but she escapes and ends up keeping house for a gang of thieves. All's good until one of the thieves visits the inn and blabs, and then the mom hires a witch to kill the daughter, and things proceed as in Snow White.
From Armenia, Nourie Hadig, in which a rich man's wife regularly asks the moon who's most beautiful, until one day it names her daughter, and she asks her husband to kill her. Less competent than the Scottish king above, the Armenian rich man fakes his daughter's death but abandons her in the forest to fend for herself. Then she wanders into a gender-swapped Sleeping Beauty situation, except she has to cook and clean for the sleeping prince for seven years before he'll wake up, and then when he does some other chick tries to steal credit, but he sees the truth at the last minute and marries the heroine. Meanwhile, the mother had soon learned from the moon that her daughter was alive, and had spent the seven years unsuccessfully hunting for her, but after the marriage the moon starts referring to her as "the princess of (location)", thus giving her away. So then the mother makes an enchanted ring that puts the wearer in a coma, and persuades the daughter to wear it, and this works for a while but eventually someone tries to steal it, she wakes up, and the mother dies of rage-induced apoplexy.
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