GMFW Reviews: Snow White

After two years of controversy surrounding Disney’s live action remake of “Snow White”… after all the bad press, all the reshoots and re-cuts, all the rumors and the pre-release critical horror shows, and all the publicity rakes the studio stepped on along the way… by the time I sat down, picked up the remote and began navigating over to the Disney+ app to finally watch “Snow White”, you’d better believe I had my shotgun across my lap and both barrels loaded. I was hunting for bear and I had every intention of bringing you back a big rich helping of red meat.

All of that is to say, ladies and gentlemen, that I failed. I have returned from the enchanted forest empty handed.

Well, that’s not exactly true, I did return with one thing… an absolutely unshakeable conviction that Rachel Zegler blew up her career for no good reason at all.

This is not to say the movie is great… it isn’t… it just isn’t bad enough to deserve what happened to it… and certainly it is good enough for its target audience to have spent a perfectly enjoyable Saturday evening at the theater. I’ve seen bad family movies this year, my friends… coughcoughMinecraftcoughcough… and there’s no reason why “Snow White” should have bombed when other mediocre family movies slayed at the box office, especially in a year where the theatrical movie business appears to be on the upswing.

Well… no other reason than Rachel Zegler.

“Snow White” faced many problems over its long meandering trip from production to release, which included the better part of two years spent sitting on a shelf while Disney tried to figure out what the hell to do with the mess they’d created for themselves. But by far the worst problem which dogged the film was a series of fatal comments in the press by its unfortunate young star.

It all began with an Entertainment Weekly interview in which Zegler said that Disney’s beloved first full-length animated feature “scared” her, and that she “watched it once and never picked it up again.” Later, in a different interview she would utter the line that launched a million anti-Disney online influencers when she said “it’s no longer 1937” and that Snow White “was not going to be saved by the Prince. And she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” The final nail in the coffin came when she was interviewed at Disney’s annual D23 convention where she described the kiss which awakens Snow White in the original movie as coming from “a guy who literally stalks her”, that the movie’s most famous moment is “weird” and that audiences could rest assured that they “didn't do that this time.”

Well… these comments could not have come at a worse cultural moment for Disney. The movie business at the time found itself at the tail end of a very unpopular trend of movies which featured “modern political messaging” for which “woke” had become an easy shorthand. Audiences had begun to roundly reject these kinds of movies and Zegler had just told the world that her new film, a live-action remake of one of Disney’s most beloved titles, was going to be another “woke” girlboss mess.

And thus began two years of reshoots, re-edits and panicked studio crisis PR. There was even a rumor that mega-producer Marc Platt got on a plane and flew to New York to tell his young star to shut the hell up in hopes of saving his movie (from which he probably stood to make 8 figures in success). “Snow White” finally came out this past March and quickly disappeared from theaters with a dismal $200 million in worldwide box office… one of Disney worst performing live-action movie releases of all time.

But here’s the most amazing thing… it was all for nothing.

Despite Rachel Zegler setting up audiences to expect a steaming pile of woke garbage, that is not what the film actually delivers. Rather, the story as told in 2025 is much the same as it was in 1937.

THE “FAIREST” OF THEM ALL

As “Snow White” careened towards its release, there was a growing fear amongst the fan base that Disney was going to take a “woke” approach to many of the themes they loved from the original story… most notably, that the remake would push the hoary fiction that female “beauty” is about servicing the male gaze… that the pursuit of beauty creates unrealistic standards that make young women depressed… that beauty shouldn’t matter to anyone for any reason… and that this message would be delivered by changing the definition of “Fair” to describe how Queens rule over their Kingdoms, rather than how beautiful they are.

Surprisingly, this was not the case. When the Evil Queen (played by the appropriately gorgeous Gal Gadot) asks her magic mirror to tell her who is the fairest of them all, the mirror is clear in its response… the Queen’s Beauty is unsurpassed. She is the fairest of them all.

This story beat is a critical part of the tale, both in 1937 and in 2025. The fear of growing older, of losing one’s beauty (or status, or career, or physical prowess), of being replaced by someone younger, is an emotion and an anxiety felt by almost everyone on Earth. To eliminate this most universal of themes in hopes of updating the story for a “modern audience” would have been a tremendous mistake.

But miracle of miracles, not only did Disney avoid this mistake with their live-action remake, the filmmakers actually did a pretty good job of updating the theme and making it feel even more culturally relevant.

In the 2025 version, as in 1937, the Evil Queen is obsessed with losing her beauty. She wakes up each morning desperate to know if she remains the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. But in the 2025 update, the filmmakers added a twist. Whereas the 1937 Queen fears losing her beauty for its own sake, the 2025 Evil Queen fears losing her beauty because her beauty is the source of her power. And in a world where online services like “Only Fans” are delivering very conspicuous wealth to a small cadre of extremely attractive, often impossibly “enhanced” young women, this is actually a much more clever and pointed villain plot than the one I was expecting.

As for Snow White, in the end the mirror is forced to admit that the young Princess has surpassed her evil stepmother as the “fairest” of them all. But in a nod to Gal Gadot’s otherworldly beauty, the mirror adds the caveat that Snow White is beautiful both inside and out, unlike the Evil Queen for whom beauty remains merely a surface trait. This too seems like a clever and valuable update for our modern times.

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME

As with the universal human fear of losing one’s youth and vitality, you don’t have to be a young woman to understand in your gut the powerful human desire for love. This is the main reason why the original “Snow White” continues to attract audiences of all ages and both genders despite originally being targeted primarily at young girls and their moms (the original “Snow White” was 14-years-old). It is a story about a promising young woman who finds the one thing all of us want more than fame or even money… True Love.

And yes, it is true that the way in which the original “Snow White” addressed this universal theme of “True Love” feels a little dated here in 2025, and I’m even willing to concede that remaking the movie in a way that makes Snow White’s desire to find love feel more modern was a good idea. The danger being, of course, that Disney might have jettisoned the love story altogether, under the modern political theory seemingly embraced by Rachel Zegler on the red carpet, that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

But in another surprising development, the remake embraces “True Love” in a way that works quite well. The movie begins by eliminating Snow White’s passive acceptance of her life as a scullery maid, and doing away with the musical number “Someday My Prince Will Come”, all in favor of a character with more agency. This is good and proper. I don’t have daughters but if I did, I would tell them that sitting around waiting for a good man to come along and find you is a really good way to wind up single and alone.

This Snow White is much more proactive. She doesn’t sit around waiting for her circumstances to change. She tries to make a difference in her own life, first by asking her Evil Stepmother to have mercy on a young man caught stealing food, and then later by going out into the courtyard and releasing him from the stockade where the Evil Queen has decided he should be imprisoned as a symbol to all those who would defy her.

Later, the young man will repay Snow White’s kindness and a romance will begin to develop between them. Within the context of the story, this version of Snow White, one who is surprised by the love she feels for a good and decent young man feels real and appropriate for our time.

This is not “woke”… this is good drama.

THE KISS

Whether she meant to do so or not, in calling Snow White’s Prince a “stalker”, Rachel Zegler brought up the ugly specter of sexual harassment and reminded us of the political paroxysms brought on by the now mostly defunct #MeToo movement. Zegler seemed to be suggesting that the kiss which revived the comatose Snow White in the 1937 film was stolen without consent, and that the magical kiss so beloved by generations of movie-goers amounted to something like a sexual assault.

That whirring sound you heard was the eyes of millions of Disney fans rolling in their sockets fast enough to generate one-point-twenty-one gigawatts of electrical power as they prepared themselves for yet another favorite movie moment to be sacrificed upon the altar of “modern messaging.”

Except that’s not at all what happened.

Despite first setting out into the wilderness with the practical goal of deposing the Evil Queen and returning justice to her Kingdom, Snow White eventually finds herself surprised by the fully-requited love she develops for Jonathan, the good looking young man she freed from the stockade earlier in the film. Later on, Snow White does bite into the poison apple, just as she did in 1937… she does fall into a magical coma just as she did in 1937, a spell which can only be broken by “true love”… and she is magically awakened by Jonathan’s kiss… a kiss for which she is unable to provide consent… just as in 1937.

Despite Zegler’s protestations that they “didn’t do that this time”… they did, in fact, “do that.”

And everything turns out fine. Snow and her Jonathan fall in love, they reclaim the kingdom from the Evil Queen and then everyone dances in the town square… while eating apple pies for some reason. Look, I think if you go back and read this review from the beginning you’ll find I was very clear that this is not a great movie… but the question on everyone’s mind lo these past two years has not been “is it a great movie?”, but “is it a woke movie?” And I’m here to tell you that it is not.

So finally, the question must be asked again. What was Rachel Zegler thinking?

Zegler’s derisive comments about a beloved Disney classic combined with her very public activism for and with some truly stupid and offensive political causes made the “Snow White” remake toxic with legions of movie fans who were sick to death of a Hollywood which seemed more interested in ham-fisted political messaging than with great characters and compelling storytelling… and so they stayed home.

But the actual movie that was released bore little resemblance to the movie Zegler assured us was coming. Rather it is a perfectly enjoyable and inoffensive remake, and the fact that it has a 71% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes suggests that I’m not the only one who thought so.

And still, Disney lost a fortune on the movie.

A healthy business might see the lesson in this series of actions, reactions and results and then take great pains to make sure none of it ever happens again… but if the last five years has taught us anything, it is that there is not a rake on Earth that Hollywood in general, and Disney in particular, will not step on.

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