“For the past little while, there’s been this hoopla in Hollywood about these “”competing”” Snow White movies. Is there room enough for both? Do you need to be first to do better? Which cast is gonna draw more people? Then trailers started to appear, and you could see the big difference between the two. One is light and campy, the other dark and epic. Julia’s queen was a cartoon, Charlize a fiend. Except for sharing a source and a few basic elements, they’re pretty much apples and oranges. Turns out after all the debate, they were both kinda awful.
I talked about Mirror Mirror already, so I’ll drop the comparison and just focus on Huntsman. In short, it was kinda boring. Not a whole lot happening. The plot was as minimal as you could get. We all know the basic evil queen/fair princess bit, and from there all that was driving it was “”Snow White’s gotta run away and escape””. We’d see her encounter some interesting people and magical creatures, but the novelty of everything she found wore off more quickly than the previous one. I just didnt have any real reason to care.
If anything, I think I was rooting for the queen on some level. The simple reason is that Charlize Theron was by far the best part about the movie. She was so beautiful and sinister and oozing with delicious evil. There’s a reason people questioned why anyone would consider Kristen Steward to be fairer than she. What I was loving about Theron’s performance is that she had two modes. One, she was cool and calculating, spoke with a piercing but soft voice that was creepy yet just soothing enough to lull one to false security. And then on the flip side she was as full of rage and so scary and powerful. She’s not your Disney queen.
Kristen Stewart annoyed me a bit. It’d be unfair to blame it all on the Bella factor, but I cant exactly ignore that either. It’s more that she just really does seem to only have one mode. All the same expressions and reactions, and she kinda looked out of place in her dress she wore for half the movie. Chris Hemsworth also felt a bit underutilized, used as little more than a pretty face. True, he has the prettiest of faces (fairer than our dear dear Snow White I would say) but his story was so cliche and underdeveloped. Alost kind of an insult to use Thor as such.
So there may have been a lot of pretty between the cast and the magic, but it all just went by so slowly. Perhaps they should have paid more attention to the story (or lack thereof) and not the visual
Snow White and the Huntsman – \m/ \m/