Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

[starlady]

Snow White and the Huntsman. Dir. Rupert Sanders, 2012.

I dragged my friend M (willingly) to see this with me for my birthday, and we both enjoyed it. I think that there is a much better movie hidden inside what we saw on the screen, and that the movie on the screen has a lot of stuff in it, not all of which needs to be there, but overall I liked it a lot and I am glad I saw it.

My friend S tweeted me that she thought the movie needed more evil Queen and less K.Stew, which I only half-agree with. I think the movie needed more evil Queen and that K.Stew needed much better (or, in some cases, any) lines - the screenplay is, I think, one of the weakest parts of the movie. I don't actually think K.Stew is that bad at acting, but god does this screenplay not give her much to work with. And as much as I loved Charlize Theron as the Queen, Ravenna (does anyone else remember The Pearl of the Soul of the World?), the screenplay needs to explain her thoughts at a kew fey junctures rather than relying on the bones of the fairytale.

I liked Chris Hemsworth's Huntsman - Hemsworth is good at finding the heart in lovable lug-types, and making them much less luggish thereby - and I thought everyone else was more or less fine, with a special shout-out to the dwarves as a whole for being awesome. (I counted eight dwarves initially. I didn't count wrong.) M and I both went to a Norwegian college, so as soon as we saw that bridge we said "Troll!" and we were not wrong, but overall I liked the fairy-tale elements, heterogeneous as they all were (WTF was with the White Hart!Forest Spirit? I mean, I loved Princess Mononoke as much as the next person, but really, WTF), particularly when seasoned with a few random Christian references. I think the movie would have done much better to stay firmly in fantasyland territory, but so it goes. (Fantasyland is the only way I can justify William, a Duke's son, being such an unapologetically badass archer. Archery is for peasants, remember?)

For everyone who's said that this did feel weirdly like Narnia, yeah, I would totally buy that - the not!White Stag was totally just the icing on that cake. See bedlamsbard's review for more on that.

I do think this is a fairly feminist retelling, not necessarily consciously on the filmmakers' part, but feminist all the same - recessional's review perfectly articulates basically everything I saw in the movie on that account, and so I shall just direct you there, but again, I was disappointed in the screenplay. At times it felt like Theron and Stewart's performances were from another movie, one that focused much more on their relationship and their similarities and differences and how the Queen's experiences have locked her into a paradigm that upholds the gender binary she deplores. I would rather have watched that movie than the one we got, though I liked this one fine. When else have you heard people shouting "Long live the Queen!" at the end and meaning it?

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I feel more or less the same: I enjoyed it, but also feel that it could have done better/more interesting things on a couple of fronts.

1) The fantasy was . . . random and variable. We were presented with a world where the only clear magic was scary and dangerous (and most of it belonged to Ravenna) -- until suddenly they're in Fairyland. Uh, whut? And Snow White is a magical harbinger of life! In retrospect, I guess the blood-on-snow moment with the queen was supposed to be viewed as a spell of some kind, but it didn't get presented that way very clearly, so the detour into Happy Magic Territory and Prophecyville came out of left field.

2) Given that Snow White is supposed to be a magical harbinger of life, I really wish they'd done something less conventional with the ending than having her kill Ravenna. And I feel like if they had, they could have tied it into the (very interesting) points about gender and their relationship and so on.

But none of that is to say that I disliked the movie. I enjoyed myself a fair bit; the visuals were awesome, the feminist aspects were pleasing, and the dwarves were named for the chieftain trees of Ireland, which is a bit of geekery that just melted my knees.

[starlady]

Trees? That is awesome. Also agreed.

[meganbmoore]

I'm about 90% certain that about 1/3 of this movie got left on the cutting room floor. Some of which was probably Ravenna and wee!Snow after Ravenna took over.

[starlady]

I would have liked more wee,Snow, but it already felt too long as was for me.

[meganbmoore]

I would take out the dwarves (whose function was really already served in the village of scarred women, and who, to me, felt like someone went "wait, we're using the Grimm version-supposedly-and everyone will want dwarves, so lets add them now") and spend time on Snow/Ravenna right after Ravenna takes over, and more time in the village of scarred women.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Or at least chop the Fairyland section way down. That, to me, was where the story really started to lose momentum -- especially because it wasn't payoff for anything set up before; it was a new element being thrown in without warning.

Personally, I'd favor a more radical restructuring: have Snow get to the duke's castle soon after her escape (likely by having her hitch a ride with the dude whose son got killed -- seriously, they telegraphed in every way "he's going to meet her outside the castle walls on his horse!" and then didn't do it), and then rearrange the other material in the context of Snow trying to rally support. It would make her and the other good guys a lot more proactive; as it stood, the bulk of the film consisted of them running away from the bad guys, who were the ones actually driving the plot.

[meganbmoore]

That works! (I had seen the white horse clip and some others beforehand so I knew she was going to run into the huntsman before anyone else and go pretty much straight from the castle to the forest, so I was kind of "so she's going to run across him along the way after they get out, right?")

The critical part of my brain refuses to engage in this film and it's all rather idtastic, but I wonder what we would have ended up with if they hadn't rushed production and the writers were more unified. (I'm hoping the sequel runs more smoothly.)

[seichan]

a promise of a free meal brought me to this movie...

i think k.stew is indeed probably bad at acting and/or speaking which accounted for the lack of dialogue. felt like snow white should be saying more all over the movie especially at the end.

hope ravenna comes back to life for the 2nd and 3rd movie...actually i hope they never make the 2nd and 3rd movies. just more thor and avenger movies.