Snow White and the Huntsman

Logline: In a twist to the fairy tale, the Huntsman ordered to take Snow White into the woods to be killed winds up becoming her protector and mentor in a quest to vanquish the Evil Queen.

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Sam Claflin

Directed by: Rupert Sanders

This movie may or may not be slandered forever by the notorious scandal between Kristen Stewert and director Rupert Sanders. Regardless, I was intrigued by the concept of twisting Snow White's tale and making it dark. Batman did it, Superman is going to do it, and now this.

Summary

The Evil Queen has taken over yet another kingdom. This time she messed with the wrong one as her evil enchantment becomes in danger when the "purest of them all" is held prisoner in her castle - Snow White. Snow White escapes just as The Queen is about to kill her and runs off into the dark forest. The Queen sends The Huntsman in after her. He tracks her down, captures her, and finds out the Queen had lied to him about being able to bring his wife back, so they venture out to the Duke's castle while being chased by the Queen's evil people.

Review

Kristen Stewart takes a lot of flak for her role as Bella Swan in the Twilight series. I've seen her act in it and at times it is quite laughable. However, I've always been with the group that keeps saying it's the movie's fault that the character is so dull and the dialogue is so corny. I've seen her play Joan Jett and other minor roles; she wasn't THAT bad. I was hoping Snow White and the Huntsman was going to be the final tell of her acting for me. A big blockbuster movie, a relationship with Thor, Charlize Theron as the Queen... I wanted to see how she'd match up with all of them. Unfortunately I didn't get to. She hardly has any dialogue and does basic acting 101 for the majority of the movie. Again, I think this is the movie's fault, not hers. The little she had to do in this movie she did it well.

On to the movie review aspect. I couldn't care less about this film. I absolutely hate it when movies take their sweet time to get into the story. Honestly it was about 25 minutes before anything remotely interesting happened because the first 25 were all backstory that could have been compacted into 5 or 10. This almost killed the movie for me, but I kept watching. My TOTD will dive into the many problems of storytelling.

The characters were soooooooo bland. The Queen kind of just yelled a lot. She had one decent scene where she tricks Snow White, but other than that she was reaaaaaallllly boring. When the film's evil antagonist is boring and you really couldn't care less to watch her fall - that's a recipe for disaster. All it needed was one scene of her doing something absolutely despicable for us to hate her. Snow White never really did anything good either - we were just told she was pure and were forced to believe it. The only decent character was The Huntsman because we find out about his wife being killed by the Queen and we have sympathy for him. He's also fearless and would do anything to protect innocent people.

The one thing it had going for it was the visual effects. Normally I don't give ratings based on visuals, but I turned this movie on expecting some creepy and awesome looking monsters and it delivered in that sense.

Topic of the Day

This film was primarily a chase movie like Premium Rush which I reviewed the other day.

To make a chase movie work the stakes have to be high and there has to be urgency. Snow White and the Huntsman has both, but doesn't exploit them very well. The film blows all of its stakes in one go. Reach the Duke's castle or the Queen will live forever and nature will suffer along with innocent people. Simple right? Well, those stakes are never raised & to be honest, I don't think they could have been. That's a serious problem. Raising the stakes is crucial to keep an audience interested in a chase movie because the audience needs reasons to keep the movie fresh on their minds and on the edge of their seats. Urgency was also there because they were being chased, but you never got a glimpse of the bad guys on their tail - they just always seemed to show up at inopportune times. I felt that by choosing not to show the bad guys the film suffered because the tone was all wrong.

By the climax everyone knew a big battle was coming, the Queen was going to be taken down and Snow White would prevail - but personally I had no interest in watching it (even though I had to for the sake of this review).

Consensus

Snow White and the Huntsman provides the visuals, but fails to follow simple storytelling rules that hold a film together and keep it fresh. Rupert Sanders decided it was alright to take his time developing the story which in return made it really boring and dull - especially because he was only developing story and not developing characters. It had the right intentions, but the execution was poor and the visuals became almost irrelevant. 

4.5/10