Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

So this is the second Snow White type film to come out this year, well, actually third since the Asylum released that ‘Mirror Mirror’ copy, but anyway, this version is the darkest one this year. Kind of.

Let’s start this off with the plot. In case you don’t know it by now. A Queen wishes for a daughter, which she gets said daughter, Queen dies and the Kingdom is invaded by an army made of glass. The King saves a woman, Ravenna, (Charlize Theron) from the glass army and marries her. But it turns out she was in charge of the glass army, murders the King and conquers the land. Fifteen years later Snow (Kristen Stewart) becomes the fairest of them all, and Ravenna learns from the Mirror (Christopher Obi) that she can become immortal if she takes Snow’s heart. Snow escapes thanks to some birds (I’ll get back to that later) and Revanna sends the huntsman Eric after her. He, of course, changes sides.

 

Firstly, the most obvious flaw in this film. The evil Queen is Charlize Theron. Snow White is Kristen Stewart. Snow White is suppose to be prettier than the Queen, you’ve screwed it up already movie! No offence to Stewart, she’s an attractive woman, but Theron is so much more beautiful than her. It’s nitpicking, I know.

The plot is good enough, it’s your the good vs. evil ploy which the modern Snow White productions seem to taking on, but as I said before, this is a much darker version. Or so I thought. Yes it has its dark moments, but the film has its Disney moments. I’ll explain, we see a younger Snow White (Raffey Cassidy) taking care of an injured bird, even though I should think that she’s causing great pain to that bird by holding it that tight. But anyway, this apparently means she becomes best friends with the birds. Don’t ask me how. But this apparently means she becomes best friends with every single other animal. Including a magnificent stag, which was a big lipped alligator moment. Though it did have an unexpected hilarious moment. But Jesus Christ, she uses this...ability I guess, to make a stop a troll attacking her and the Huntsman, and walk away! THAT'S STUPID!

 

With that, Kristen Stewart, was meh. I actually think she has the potential to be a great actress, but she’s just so dull. She’s so bland, she’s so emotionless, she is just a terrible actress. All she can do is at least smile! Oh...wow...she smiled...it’s so...unnatural...go back to being miserable. That’s better.

Along with that her character is so contradicting. She says she’s not used to light, despite her dungeon having a window, her speeches would annoy Elizabeth Swan, and, while she gets a ten second piece of advice from the Huntsman on how to use a knife, she becomes a sword fighter without us seeing her have any training. In all fairness she does use the knife technique later.

Moving on to Queen Revanna. I have to commend the film for expanding on the Queen apart from “she’s evil”, we actually see a more human side to the her, we see that she has emotions. Along with that we can see how evil and manipulative the Queen can be. With that being said, half the time Theron portrays Revanna as a spoilt little brat who’s having a temper tantrum since she didn’t get the her ice cream. But still, she does manage to bring us a character which we can feel sorry for and, in some ways, actually root for.

Chris Hemsworth in the meantime is, again, the most memorable.. He’s probably the best actor in this as well as the most effective, Hemsworth pours out his heart in one scene, we can really see how great an actor he is. And yet, I don’t think he should be in this film. He’s recruited by Revanna’s brother Finn (Sam Spruell), after we see him lose a bar fight, how did he make such an impact? Then again Finn is an idiot for basically saying straight out that the Queen is manipulating the Huntsman.

You also remember one of the main aspects in the Snow White tale right? The one concerning the seven dwarfs? Yeah. There’s eight. And I can barely remember any of them, they left that much of an impact. In fact, I didn’t even notice there were eight dwarfs until I was talking about the film with the Whalley and...Ryan, and mentioned there were seven dwarfs before being corrected.

The only thing I really remember about the dwarfs are that they’re actually averaged-sized, with actors including Nick Frost and Ray Winstone. And that I only remember because the Los Angeles dwarf theatre group Beacher’s Madhouse are planning are “one hundred midget march on Universal offices” (The Sun newspaper). That, and that one of the dwarfs is blind but precognitive, and like Griffin from ‘Men in Balck 3’ he grows tiresome quickly.

This film, is a mixed one for me, but in all honesty, it does lean towards the positive side. While the acting is mainly stupid, the plot is confusing at times and the script goes between dark and corny, there are some positive acting moments, mainly from Theron (At times) and Hemsworth, and the effects are actually quite amazing. What truly holds this film back is the bad casting choice of Stewart, but if you can look past that...there’s still a fair bit to hate. It’s not the best film in the world, but I would recommend that you give it a try; you might like it, but there’s plenty of things dragging it down.