Film Review: Snow White and the Huntsman

Snow White and the Huntsman. Rated M (fantasy themes and violence). 127 minutes. Directed by Rupert Sanders. Screenplay by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini.

Verdict: The long and winding road that leads to a palace.

While it is certainly a stunning film to look at, Snow White and the Huntsman takes too many detours and far too much time to wend its way through what is a very familiar story of a princess feted to rise up against a murderous Queen and regain the throne she was ruthlessly denied.

Similarly to Tarsem Singh’s gorgeous looking Snow White-lite take earlier this year (Mirror, Mirror) Sanders’ equally-sumptuous affair boasts Dominic Watkins’ (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93) extravagant production design and Colleen Atwood’s (Alice in Wonderland, Memoirs of a Geisha) picture-perfect costumes. Melbourne-born Greig Fraser (Caterpillar Wish, Bright Star, Let Me In) cements his international reputation with outstanding cinematography that captures every essence of the film’s many challenging and constantly changing moods and locations.

The writers and Sanders, making his feature film debut, make what turns out to be a near-fatal error by mistaking ‘long’ for ‘epic’. What they risk in the process is undermining the film’s many great qualities, which other than in the design departments and some inventive sequences (especially the scenes set at the lakeside commune where the once-beautiful women have fled from the evil queen’s life-draining hunger for their beauty), are the spirited performances and a flawless visual tapestry of creative splendour.

Chris Hemsworth (Thor) does his best work to date as the grieving Huntsman, while Charlize Theron (Prometheus, Monster) goes for broke from start to finish and never misses a trick. Kristen Stewart (Twilight’s Bella) flexes her acting muscles in ways that have not been required of her in the Twilight franchise, and the fact that we never really care about her fate is the fault of the wandering and didactic screenplay – not her spirited charge through the leading role.

The actors who play the dwarfs (including Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone and Nick Frost) have been digitally manipulated to the size of a dwarf which works for a moment – before you begin to realise that the film is almost beginning to sink with too much trickery at the expense of being something we might have actually been a good deal more engaged by. Apparently, and there’s no prizes, there’s going to be a sequel. Please let it be over in half the time. If that.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.