Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Directed by Rupert Sanders
After the Evil Queen marries the King, she performs a violent coup in which the King is murdered and his daughter, Snow White, is taken captive. Almost a decade later, a grown Snow White is still in the clutches of the Queen. In order to obtain immortality, The Evil Queen needs the heart of Snow White. After Snow escapes the castle, the Queen sends the Huntsman to find her in the Dark Forest.
46 connections found
View:
46 films that influenced Snow White and the Huntsman
What critics say influenced Snow White and the Huntsman
It’s neither the kid-friendly take of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the two-month-old Mirror Mirror , nor the R-rated horror version offered by 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror .
This time, however, the mirror takes on a more eerie persona as part of it melts to the floor and then reshapes into cloaked, human-like form (as if the Harry Potteresque father of Robert Patrick's shape-shifting, liquid metal cyborg in "Terminator 2").
Years later, Ravenna learns from her magic mirror - a fabulous "Terminator 2"-style, molten metal concoction with a voice like Barry White in his prime - that Snow White's purity is the only thing that can destroy the queen.
It's a dynamic that hardly smacks of chance, any more than the sweeping vistas virtually plucked from the "Rings" trilogy; the magic mirror that morphs into an oozing mass seemingly culled from "Terminator 2;" or portentous dialogue in which it is pronounced, "She is the one," in reverent "Matrix"-like tones, regarding Snow's ability to end the Queen's evil reign.
The effects are, it must be noted, impressive--the queen's melting and reforming T2-style mirror is remarkable, and the visual effects in the fairy sanctuary are awe-inspiring--though that neat trick of seeing someone shape-shift after they get hit with a sword loses its novelty by the fifth or sixth time they trot it out.
There isn’t a cohesive world here, as in The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, both of which Huntsman desperately evokes: instead, there’s random bits of magic and landscapes that make no organic sense but are strung together because, hey, ya gots to have snowy mountains and swampy Pits of Despair and castles on the ocean all within easy walking distance of one another in a fantasy flick.
From the ambitious battle scenes to the grandiose monsters, Sanders is aiming for a scale of fantasy reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings.
English commercial director Rupert Sanders makes his feature debut with a splash, launching a fantasy-adventure franchise that probably isn’t as good as any of the things it references — the classic Walt Disney film, of course, but also “The Lord of the Rings,” the Narnia series, “Game of Thrones,” “Star Wars,” Shakespeare and countless other works besides — but comes close enough, I’d guess, to carve out its own niche and create its own fan base.
Taking its cue from Twilight, Red Riding Hood and The Lord of the Rings, Snow White and the Huntsman very, very much longs to be a dark fairy tale, the sort where the skies are always charcoal gray and the characters are forever uttering their dialogue with an air of heavy significance.
A full-force fairy tale that takes the Grimms' twisty yarn and adds heapings of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Joan of Arc, and Celtic myth, Snow White and the Huntsman - with Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth in the title roles - is not your grandmother's Disney cartoon.
It’s neither the kid-friendly take of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the two-month-old Mirror Mirror , nor the R-rated horror version offered by 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror .
'Snow White' — Disney's 1937 animated account of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" is based on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's violent folk tale.
Years, nay decades, have gone by without a film being made about the Grimm's fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, after Walt Disney introduced it in his classic 1937 cartoon.
Because this is, indeed, a take-off on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"most indelibly made into Disney's 1937 animated classicscreenwriters Hossein Amini (2011's "…
Or maybe it’s Walt Disney, working his juju from beyond the grave, determined that no future film ever upstage his iconic, first full-length cel animated feature, the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
We are all familiar with the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney’s 75-year-old masterpiece.
Advertisement
Sanders uses a patchwork of shooting and aesthetic techniques inspired by Ridley Scott, Terrence Malick, Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, George Lucas, David Lean and even a musical queue that reminded me of John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China – and for a cinefile it became a ‘spot’ the homage.
But without an experienced director brave enough to tell the Oscar-winner when to say when, she chews the scenery at a rate so voracious you can’t help recalling Faye Dunaway’s shameless vamping in “Mommie Dearest.”
When an actress goes this far out on a highly theatrical ledge—think Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest —critics are usually waiting with their penknives, ready to skewer the performance as camp.
Making considerably less sense is an interlude where Snow White goes into a magical, fairy-filled garden and encounters a spirit god directly lifted from Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" (a great, many-antlered deity).
That entire sequence feels like it's pulled directly out of " Princess Mononoke ."
This bizarre and seemingly pointless scene, which felt like it was straight out of Princess Mononoke, is immediately followed by yet another attack, of which we had already seen plenty of by that point.
The movie itself feels cobbled together from left over bits and pieces from Ladyhawke, Conan the Destroyer, Princess Mononoke (believe it or not) and, most importantly, Tangled.
Snow White and the Huntsman is a movie specifically designed for Stephenie Meyer's audience of lonesome illiterates, hoping they'll rip their sweaty bug-eyes away from Fifty Shades of Grey long enough to feast on a circa-1995 feminist fairytale update (watch it on a double-feature with Drew Barrymore's Ever After), complete with a Fabio-tastic hero and an inexplicable Princess Mononoke interlude.
She tests her success with the proverbial mirror on the wall, which melts into molten metal and assumes a spectral form, not unlike Death in " The Seventh Seal ," although its metallic transformation process reminds us of "The Terminator."
Advertisement
Nightmarishly brutal, set against wintry landscapes and medieval battlements, and rife with hopeless, starving peasants, it’s practically a full-bore horror picture, reminiscent of Game of Thrones , Joan of Arc, and Countess Dracula?the one where the title character, inspired by Elizabeth Bathory, stays youthful by bathing in the blood of young women.
Nightmarishly brutal, set against wintry landscapes and medieval battlements, and rife with hopeless, starving peasants, it’s practically a full-bore horror picture, reminiscent of Game of Thrones , Joan of Arc, and Countess Dracula?the one where the title character, inspired by Elizabeth Bathory, stays youthful by bathing in the blood of young women.