That title is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders. Those otherwise estimable performers Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot are now forced to go through the motions, and they give the dullest performances of their lives.
Traditionally, the heroine’s name refers to her skin, with lips red as blood and hair dark as ebony; now it refers to the snowstorm that accompanied her birth. Zegler’s Snow White had loving parents in the King and Queen but after her mother’s death her father becomes infatuated with a witchy new noblewoman at court; Gadot’s lips are at all times seductively and contemptuously pursed. But later the King simply vanishes from the story and the script ties itself into a few pretzels explaining what is supposed to have happened to him and when. The stepmom-witch keeps Snow White in Cinderella-style serfdom below stairs where the poor child wanly sympathises with the population’s poverty. As Snow White grows up, the magic mirror breaks the bad news about a change in the prettiness-ranking; Snow White is then forced to flee to the forest and stay there once the huntsman has lied to the witch about killing her. And then she meets her seven new best friends …
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Admittedly, the basic story has a strangeness of its own. The wicked queen tries to kill Snow White by getting the huntsman to stab her, and then tries again by feeding her a poisoned apple which has an, erm, antidote in the form of a true love’s kiss … and then leaving the corpse in the company of people who love her? Weird.
This new Snow White has one or two nice musical moments, but it’s basically in the unhappy tradition of revisionist-lite reboots Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman with Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron respectively as the witch – and the equally ropey prequel The Huntsman: Winter’s War. Hollywood could in theory reinvent Snow White with some passion; instead, the only decent revival has been Pablo Berger’s surrealist Blancanieves from 2013. This feels like a very hard day’s work in the IP diamond mine.
• Snow White is out on 20 March in Australia and on 21 March in the UK and US.
