109 min | PG | March 21, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures
Disney remakes Snow White with CGI dwarfs and flattened fairytale logic. The modernization rings hollow. The performances feel constrained. The whole enterprise misses the point.
Live-action Disney remakes follow a pattern. Take an animated classic. Add real actors. Update the messaging for modern sensibilities. The problem is this formula assumes the original stories need fixing when what they need is genuine reinterpretation. Snow White attempts to modernize an eighty-five-year-old fairytale and ends up with something that feels neither classic nor contemporary.
Rachel Zegler plays Snow White with earnestness that the material does not support. The script gives her updated dialogue about agency and power that lands like a corporate memo about female empowerment. She tries to find a character in the writing and the writing gives her nothing to work with. Gal Gadot plays the Evil Queen with the same stilted delivery she brings to most roles. The two actors share scenes and generate no tension or chemistry. Andrew Burnap plays Jonathan, a forest dweller who replaces the prince, and disappears into a role with no definition.
Marc Webb directs with the same anonymous competence he brought to the Amazing Spider-Man films. The production design recreates the animated film’s aesthetic with live-action sets that look expensive and fake. The CGI dwarfs are a technical achievement and a creative disaster. They exist in the uncanny valley between cartoon and reality and the effect is unsettling in ways the film does not intend. The musical numbers are staged without energy or invention.
The film attempts to thread a needle between honoring the original and updating for contemporary audiences. It does neither. The result is a sanitized, lifeless retelling that understands what it wants to say about women and power but has no idea how to dramatize those ideas through character or story. Disney keeps making these remakes. This one demonstrates why they should stop.