It’s too hesitant to embrace tradition, too calculating to rebel.
It says a lot about our cultural moment that Disney’s live-action Snow White was labeled “woke” before a single frame even hit the screen – when, in reality, it’s not particularly subversive. In fact, it’s a film that’s too afraid to stand for anything — too hesitant to embrace tradition, too calculating to rebel. Swaddled in pastel hues and lacquered in sterile gloss, it lands with all the excitement of a birthday gift from that aunt you see once every few years who lives in a cul-de-sac outside of Fargo. What’s inside that glittering, ribboned box? A bag of Costco socks. Not the fun kind. Beige. Multipack. On sale.
Directed by Marc Webb and starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, Snow White is a confused pastiche — pretty in pieces but aimless as a whole. It gestures at girlboss empowerment with all the commitment of a shrug, awkwardly stapled to the bones of the 1937 Oscar-winning original (honored with one statuette and seven miniatures, in case anyone forgot). There’s still an apple. There’s even a kiss. But there’s no tension, no danger, and not much depth. Prince Charming is now a streetwise commoner — a clever inversion in theory, but one that plays like a half-baked Post-it no one remembered to pull from the writers’ room whiteboard.
Zegler, despite her Twitter tantrums, nearly rescues the film with her crystalline vibrato. She really should’ve let her admirable performance speak for itself. But like so many in Hollywood, newsrooms, and yes, Congress, the 23-year-old suffers from platformitis: the compulsion to turn every stage into a personal branding opportunity. One day dabbling in Middle East punditry — as part of a trailer rollout, no less — the next swiping at Republican voters. It wasn’t brave, just reckless. When Marlon Brando and Paul Newman marched for civil rights, they took real risks. Zegler played with the house’s money — goodwill and Disney bucks — and lost.
Gadot, meanwhile, has been dragged into controversy for stating the obvious: that October 7 was a massacre and hostages should be freed. Yet she’s the one who feels miscast. Her Evil Queen plays less like a fairy tale villain and more like a Swarovski infomercial — arch and campy in all the wrong ways. The Wonder Woman star is usually magnetic, but here her performance felt like rewatching a childhood favorite and realizing it was never good to begin with. Call it the Hocus Pocus effect — only this time, we’re cringing in real time.
Not every update is a misfire. For all the hand-wringing about hollowed-out masculinity, Snow White’s beau, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), literally takes an arrow for her. It’s a refreshingly brave moment of genuine chivalry. Unfortunately, the sequence doesn’t quite land because it feels like a reshoot that was tacked on months later. Even his fellow bandits’ costumes look suspiciously modern, as if a production assistant raided Party City’s medieval aisle on the way to work that morning.
What makes the film’s missteps all the more maddening is that it occasionally stirs to life, like a wind-up toy that twitches but never goes. The woodland glow is pleasant, and the CGI animals are cute enough to move units at Target — thankfully, my daughter’s too young to beg for one. Even the mine sequence, when we finally meet the dwarfs, flirts with momentum — a flicker of old-school charm that fades fast. Sadly, nothing sticks. You won’t be hi-ho’ing on the way out — just brushing popcorn off your lap and wondering what could’ve been.
It’s tempting to blame Disney’s slump on radical politics, but Snow White’s failures run deeper than “wokeness” — whatever that even means now. It’s an indictment of a culture that has forgotten why deceptively simple stories endure. The original offered moral clarity — rooted, however faintly, in Christian allegory. It turned our gaze inward, asking us to believe that hard work and kindness build character, even when they yield no immediate reward. This version trades that compelling moral vision for the Instagram version of virtue — less about being good, and, fittingly for the times, more about performative activism that judges authority not by its legitimacy, but by whether elites are nice enough to toss a few crumbs to the masses.
Should you take your kids to see it? There’s little here to shield them from — just not much that will inspire them. Before you shell out a small fortune on tickets and candy, consider introducing them to the original. Long out of the mythic Disney Vault, it still casts a quiet kind of spell. Remind them what real movie magic looks like — and why timeless tales, told with heart, are still the fairest of them all.