Snow White Review: Rachel Zegler Is Great, The Movie Is Not

The film that Disney’s Snow White remake is, and the one it so clearly wants to be, are on simultaneous display in the scene where the title character first reveals her trademark colors. Upon a sunset-drenched hill far afield from the palace, Rachel Zegler is at last encased in the red, blue, and white ruffles which looked so charming nearly a century ago on the hand-sketched page. Beside her a huntsman completes the tableau. It’s a live-action recreation of an exquisite composition from the first animated feature Walt Disney ever produced.

If you squint, some of the aspirations that director Marc Webb had for this redo are also apparent. Certain close-ups harken back to the oversaturated glory of a 1930s technicolor picture long faded on a VHS pan and scan tape. One wonders how much that reference point matters to a 2025 family film’s target audience, but such concerns are ultimately immaterial since these echoes are fleeting.

Whatever the noble creative intentions there are in this Snow White—and be sure that the casting of West Side Story’s megawatt-talented Rachel Zegler in the title role is one of the big creative pluses in the thing—they fall by the wayside of what is actually before us: a theme park pageant overeager to ingratiate and be all things to all people. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a princess meet-and-greet at Disneyland. What was once beguiling on celluloid now curdles on a digital screen that seems self-reflexively apologetic for its appearance. Indeed, the much maligned graywash of so many modern Disney films is purposely obscured by a golden filter in this scene. Nevertheless, the film remains washed out, only now the typical Marvel aesthetic of wet concrete has been traded in for tarnished gold. It looks like a Trump Tower bathroom that’s never polished.  

But at least Snow White’s singing voice is heavenly.

That voice is also on frequent display in songs old and new, as Snow White (2025) seeks to both evoke intense corporate nostalgia for a film made in a very different time and place while also infusing the material with a bit of that modern Broadway formula and sound, which has been a winner in more recent Disney animated films like Frozen and Moana. The studio even enlisted the slick songwriters of Dear Evan Hansen and The Greatest Showman, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, to provide the new tunes while beefing up what was a fairly rudimentary story in the 1937 original. 

Thus in the new Snow White, we are introduced not only to Snow White as a child (here named after the blizzard she was born in), but also her loving mother and father who raise Snow to be kind. It’s Disney idyllic until her mother passes away due to some unexplained illness, paving the way for papa to be dazzled by an enchantress from a foreign land who soon enough becomes his Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). Quickly the familiar mechanics and copyrighted iconography fall into place. The good king is disposed of and the Evil Queen condemns Snow White to servitude while obsessing over her mirror, mirror on the wall. She demands to know daily who is the fairest of them all. When the answer eventually displeases her, a stepdaughter is sentenced to death, yet ends up instead living with seven magical dwarfs (though that term is never used): the eerily digital Doc, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, etc.

There are fresh elements as well. For instance, instead of being rescued by a prince she never seriously met, this Snow White has a flirtation with a vaguely roguish captain in rebellion against the Evil Queen, Jonathan (Andrew Burlap). John and his merry band of men and women also serve as the source for many of the new songs in a movie which works overtime to introduce audiences to a more proactive princess—even as she still must be contractually saved by a kiss.

It’s a story as old as time, and in spite of its Germanic roots it’s as entrenched in American culture as apple pie and Mickey Mouse. Which might be one reason, among many, that the more hideous corners of online life in the U.S. have turned the Snow White remake into a culture war football. Ever since Zegler was cast as the princess several years ago, the same exploiters of perpetual online misery that made Star Wars fandom exhausting, and YouTube film criticism drenched in an endless loop of hate and misogyny, have set their clickbaiting sights on this film.

It’s proven an easy target, but not for the reasons they might insist on. With a magnetic screen presence and magnificent soprano, Zegler already proved she’s a star in the making by anchoring along with Ariana DeBose the best film musical of the last decade, and similarly serenading into respectability what on paper seemed a dubious Hunger Games prequel via her Appalachian lilt.

She can quite easily do justice to Frank Churchill and Larry Morey’s simple but angelic songs from ‘37, as well as Pasek and Paul’s more forgettable additions. At times, Zegler seems to even channel a little of that ‘30s starlet spunk in the old standards, injecting a touch of Ginger Rogers tap to “Whistle While You Work.” So yes, she handles the ingenue role just fine, but in a film like this that’s a semi-thankless task. This is real Broadway level talent being asked to do little better than greet theme park guests at home via their Disney+ subscriptions.

It’s a needed anchor though, considering the film’s actual problems, including perhaps why she was cast: This is a studio committee film determined to please all prospective ticket-buyers, including those who undoubtedly have noticed that as visually amazing as the first Disney animators’ work was, the O.G. Snow White is narratively simplistic and antiquated to the point of being (gasp) dated. So Snow White (2025) makes cursory gestures toward addressing these critiques, but the efforts are uneven and at odds with themselves. In trying to be both a modernization of a classic story and a worshipful ode to it, the movie clashes with itself like that red and blue dress in live, 4K definition. 

The song “Someday My Prince Will Come” is gone, as is the love interest being an honest to Walt prince (Jonathan is more in the Robin Hood/Flynn Ryder vein, albeit without the mischievous edge), but the film still yearns to appeal to Disney adults who declare umbrage that someone might find offense at the concept of “magical” dwarfs. So the half-hearted compromise is a movie that simply refuses to use the word and replaces them with horrifying CGI creations which strive for ‘30s pop art, but fall into the bleak uncanny valley of Robert Zemeckis’ many ghastly 2000s motion-capture films (an eyesore Disney ironically made fun of in the actually savvy Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers).

The Dwarfs are CG nightmares, but only slightly more so than the digital bunnies, squirrels and birds that un-persuasively insist on enchantment as they bounce around the screen. Yet whether trying to awkwardly resuscitate ancient animation in live-action or to update it with cynically produced new songs, real magic remains elusive.

The one musical addition that really works, perhaps unsurprisingly, is when Zegler is given a modern musical “I Want” Song, “Waiting on a Wish.” Still, another that might earn points for its audacity is “All Is Fair,” Gal Gadot’s big number that reveals a much autotuned singing voice. The song, like everything else about her performance, is a big swing. But despite a game desire to vamp and camp it up, Gadot has yet to find another director like Patty Jenkins who can turn her innate onscreen blankness into an asset instead of a liability. The Evil Queen is ultimately a nonentity, and Gadot’s flat, vacant presence only complementing the movie insomuch as it matches the cosplay aesthetic of her gowns and scenes opposite a dark ride mirror special effect.

The blandness of this ostensibly bad queen captures in miniature everything wrong with Snow White (2025). Here is a movie that likely would have been made a lot sooner had Universal Pictures not so adroitly stolen Disney’s thunder during the beginning of the “live-action fairy tale” craze about 15 years ago with Snow White and the Huntsman. That 2012 film is also not particularly good, but by virtue of not needing to slavishly service the past, it could do weird things like let Charlize Theron devour the screen as a milk-bathing, soul-feasting Evil Queen succubus. It stood out as its own thing, even if that thing was little more than a feature-length My Chemical Romance music video.

Snow White (2025) has one enchanting asset in its lead casting, which Disney’s caution and inclination toward consumer-testing has done everything in its power to obfuscate (including by apparently throwing its star under the bus for a media narrative the company originally courted). As it stands, is the movie good, bad, or indifferent? It’s not a disaster like the worst live-action Disney remakes—think Pinocchio or the soulless The Lion King redo. But it doesn’t stand alongside the handful worth actually seeing—Cruella, The Jungle Book, maybe Cinderella.

It’s in that vague middle-ground where a committee room decides to break for lunch. Children will undoubtedly enjoy it, lest their parents have been completely poisoned by the brain rot of social media algorithms. Adults will muddle through. A product will be consumed.

Snow White opens on Friday, March 21.

The post Snow White Review: Rachel Zegler Is Great, The Movie Is Not appeared first on Den of Geek.