'Snow White' Review: A Beautiful Apple With Little Inside It

Rachel Zegler continues to show herself the highlight of whatever she's in, which this needs

If Snow White was a jukebox musical I’d assume it would start with Rachel Zegler as the melodious Snow White singing Taylor Swift’s “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” Especially considering how much home studio Disney has simultaneously celebrated and dreaded its release. Between non-Disney sanctioned comments made by Zegler, Gal Gadot’s problematic background and that whole pesky disabled issue the movie was always going to be a tough sell since it was announced but after scaling back on the typical splashy Disney-level premiere for it it’s surprising it’s not just being placed on Disney+.

And it’s a shame because the movie, though shallower than Snow White’s wishing well, isn’t 100% terrible. Snow White is a visually gorgeous attempt to modernize a 1937 era story. It just modernizes when it should focus on storytelling and leaves behind things that probably should be a bit more nuanced. Rachel Zegler 100% keeps the mine train on the tracks, doing a lot of heavy lifting for an overabundance of CGI and Gadot’s performance, a smarmy, snarling overexaggeration. But, at the end of the day, Snow White has been so cleansed of anything that would offend, it also lacks anything that would make it memorable.

Snow White (Zegler) lives in a magical kingdom with her parents. But after her mother’s death her father marries a shadowy woman (Gadot) who takes the kingdom for herself. When Snow White threatens the Evil Queen’s supremacy as the “fairest in the land,” the Queen wishes her dead. Snow White’s kindness saves her life and she finds herself in the woods. She finds her strength with the help of seven men dwarfs magical creatures who, alongside a charming bandit named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) help Snow White take back her kingdom.

Snow White feels like a movie genetically engineered by focus groups and bean counters, all but a requirement in today’s filmmaking landscape. So much of what you see isn’t necessarily ripped from the original film as it just better movies in the Disney or musical landscape. Snow White’s kingdom looks like a mix of Genovia meets Wish. Burnap’s Jonathan is a fairly solid amalgamation of Tangled’s Flynn Rider meets Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride (there’s a lot of Princess Bride homage here). When these are used effectively, like Burnap, they create a nice bit of familiarity that’s enjoyable. When it’s bad, like Gadot’s mean girl villain song “All is Fair,” a very poor attempt to recreate Sondheim’s “The Last Midnight,” it makes you wish you could just watch the original.

The problem is what was modernized to bring the movie in line with 2025 standards feels so unnecessary and just dampens the character. Zegler is appropriately feisty and sweet as Snow White, but she falls firmly in the Strong Woman™ trope. Everyone notes how kind she is because her equally one-note parents were. Snow White’s go-to songs, “I’m Wishing” and “Someday My Prince Will Come” are nixed in favor of Pasek and Paul-penned songs that are less standard “I Want” songs and more “I’m Strong” songs. Zegler sings the hell out of them but the character is just as blah as she was before.

Erin Cressida Wilson’s script focuses on the duality of the word “fair,” with the Evil Queen using it in a beauty context while Snow White is all about the justice side. This becomes a tad heavy-handed at the end but at least makes sense from a storytelling perspective. However, eliminating Snow White’s original motivation of believing in wishes does lob a curveball at the original story, namely Snow’s motivation to eat the famous apple. It was a “wishing apple” in the original but, here, the movie just gives her an apple and lets her put 2 and 2 together.

Then there are the dwarfs magical creatures other guys Snow White encounters. Where the desire to make Snow a Modern Woman is on high alert the seven dwarfs don’t get much modernizing short of some Zemeckis-esque CGI and making Dopey look like his voice actor, Andrew Barth Feldman. The magical creatures gambit Disney used to describe the characters looks to be relegated specifically to their ability to touch things and realize where diamonds are? Otherwise it’s not wholly unclear why they differentiate themselves from humans, though they do. Where all of Snow’s original songs are nixed, the dwarfs keep all of theirs. The voice cast is so generic you’re hard-pressed to know any of the actors behind them.

However, and it is a big however, differentiating between humans and whatever the dwarfs are does mean there are authentically cast LPs in other roles, like Quigg (George Appleby), the self-proclaimed “master of the crossbow” and actor/LP Martin Klebba voicing Grumpy. Quigg gets a few laughs, and Appleby infuses the character with some charming personality. There are also various little people in the village.

Then there’s Gadot. How do you solve a problem like Gal Gadot? After seeing the likes of Charlize Theron play the Evil Queen that, coupled with stronger writing, gives the character some nuance, this Evil Queen is mired in the 1930s and that, in itself, could be a lot of fun. But Gadot doesn’t seem to understand what to do with the character. She speaks in a husky growl while rocking the same analogy throughout the movie about flowers being weak. Her song “All is Fair,” the Sondheim rip-off, is clearly written in the vein of “Be Prepared” or “Poor Unfortunate Souls” but Gadot is not able to work with the fast-paced talk-singing and at times it feels like the post-production just decided it would be better if the music drowned her out. A reprise for this adds insult to injury.

Sandy Powell’s costumes are impeccable on the Queen though. They’re pure 1930s, swathing the character in hard jewels that are beautifully eye catching. The eventual transformation of Gadot into the Old Hag gives less The Substance, or even Susan Sarandon in Enchanted, and more a Hag that just needs an upper blepharoplasty.

There’s nothing egregiously bad about Snow White. It’s as inoffensive as baby food, Zegler is really good, as is Burnap and Appleby. It’s gorgeous to look at with some great throwback production design in the glade where the dwarfs live. But, as with several other Disney live-action remakes, there’s just nothing interesting found in them. They continue to allow A-list stars to play the characters, while grayly “modernizing” them for today’s audience. It’s fine if you need to hear a song or see the latest Rachel Zegler movie. To misquote Doctor Barbie (Alexandra Shipp) in Barbie, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, you’ll have forgotten all about seeing Snow White.

Snow White is in theaters March 21.

Grade: D+