Snow White and the Huntsman

The trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman makes it look like a typical Hollywood fantasy action adventure movie.  It fits that genre, complete with the evil queen, the heroine she wants to kill and the kind of scruffy hero, but there is more to it than that.  The movie is also a fairy tale.  Well, it tries to be.

Before I go any further let me say that I liked the movie and I recommend it.

The story was good and that makes Snow White and the Huntsman a good movie, though it needed a better script.  I also thought that the pacing was a little off and it didn’t build the world as much as I would have liked, but that’s just a personal complaint.  They did seem to know what they wanted to do with the characters but they didn’t quite fit them all together well enough.

The blending of fantasy and the folklore elements was a little uneven but I’m impressed that they tried to do as much as they did.  To be a good fantasy adventure a movie needs more embellishment than a story built around elements of folklore and archetypes.  Fantasy requires more explanation that fairy tale archetypes need, and they did that (with the exception of my above complaint), but I don’t think they tied everything together well enough.  Still, what they did was impressive.

Don’t get me wrong, like I said, I enjoyed the movie and I say go see it.  My complaints aren’t enough to recommend against it.  Most of this is the kind of thing you only think about after the fact and I can always nit-pick.  This is a good film.  It is visually appealing, the settings and effects were good, and though the effects were used heavily in some places they weren’t distracting in their overabundance.  There are scenes suffused with CGI that are not overwhelmed by it.

I’ve read several negative reviews and I really don’t think the people who wrote them saw the same movie I saw.  Every one of them missed things and then complained that they weren’t there or they complained about things that weren’t in the movie.  Almost no one got the point of it being a fairy tale and all that that involves.  I have a feeling the reviewers were all expecting something and when they didn’t get it they criticized the movie for not being what they wanted it to be.

Everyone does seem to like Charlize Theron though, and with good reason.

The good definitely outweighs any weaknesses, which are probably not anything most people would care about anyway, so go see it.

Oh, if you are planning on taking young children be aware that there are dark parts to this film.  Actually, it is overall a dark – as in atmosphere and lighting – film.  Though the young girl next to us seemed to handle it all well.  The infant crying in the back of the theater had other reasons to do so – probably just a critic.