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Adam
06-02-2012, 04:11 PM
imdb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1735898/)

http://www.movieposter.com/posters/archive/main/143/MPW-71807

Adam
06-02-2012, 04:21 PM
Not awful, but 100% humorless and familiar. Chaz Theron and Chris Hemsworth were both enjoyable and it's actually put together with more than a base level of competence; which made me remember something Theo Panayides wrote once to the effect of "A lot of the editors and DPs and directors who work on bad films are still lovers of film."

But what the duck, Hollywood? Hire real dwarfs!

Mal
06-02-2012, 04:39 PM
I'm not going to complain about a movie that has Ian McShane as a dwarf.

That was one of many great surprises for me. It's a bit so-so because it is obvious that this is the director's first dance, but what this film gets so right is atmosphere, visuals, and riding the dark fairy-tale-horse all the way to the end. K. Stew is oddly enough a great Snow White- didn't care for Charlize, but I liked Hemsworth probably more than anything else he's done prior. Had this been made by a more seasoned director with this same cast and budget, it probably could have been a wonderful epic, but as is, its just good.

Kurosawa Fan
06-02-2012, 04:45 PM
Probably seeing this tonight. For some reason my dad called and asked if I wanted to go. Didn't peg this as his kind of movie, but at least it isn't Battleship.

[ETM]
06-02-2012, 04:49 PM
I had no intention of seeing this, but the trailer was delicious, so I'm taking my girlfriend and a friend to see it tomorrow night.

Watashi
06-02-2012, 05:33 PM
The only way I would see this is for the dwarves.

eternity
06-02-2012, 07:48 PM
Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.

The script is nonsense. It shamelessly takes key events from Snow White and strips out everything that makes any of it make even a lick of sense, and replaces it with a bunch of random, insignificant scenes. KStew, Charlize, and even Hemsworth give the worst performances I've seen from them, but I can't really blame them; there's no way to come out of a movie like this unscathed.

Mal
06-02-2012, 09:16 PM
Ets, I have to give you credit for not injecting a single pop culture reference into your paragraph.

Kurosawa Fan
06-03-2012, 03:12 AM
Holy hell this was stupid. The only thing this had going for it was the gothic atmosphere and the settings, but that was squandered by forcing the Evil level up to a billion (that's Evil with a capital E). The story was poorly conceived, inconsistent, and all around pathetic. The performances weren't much better, with Theron taking the cake (All the Heston with zero the fun!!!). KStew has one face: constipated. She is atrocious. The movie feels an hour longer than it actually was thanks to terrible pacing and a dull, flimsy connection between Snow White and Mother Nature. Seriously, this is a train wreck.

I think I would have been better off seeing Battleship.

Watashi
06-03-2012, 05:23 AM
Since when do we call her KStew now?

Sxottlan
06-03-2012, 05:49 AM
Some visually striking and inspired moments, even if one borrows shamelessly from Miyazaki. The hallucinations in the forest were pretty good. Funny how their attempt to return the story to its darker roots only comes off smelling of desperation.

Acting all around was pretty bad. Theron was especially bad. Having not seen any of the Twilight movies, this is probably the first Kristen Stewart film I've seen since Panic Room. I dunno. She was alright I guess. I did have to stifle a laugh when one of the dwarfs declared her "the One!" I couldn't help but feel that the producers may have put the love triangle that goes nowhere into the movie simply because they're used to seeing Stewart threatened at all times of being in a man sandwich.

And if she's life incarnate or some such thing, why couldn't she bring that one dwarf back from the dead?

And if the damn queen can simply change shape and just find Snow White in an instant, why didn't she do that right away and save us an hour?

Seriously. I think I had more fun envisioning the eventual porn parody.

Damn. With exception of The Avengers, this summer movie season has been pretty terrible so far. Here's what I've seen:

The Avengers: ****
Dark Shadows: **
Battleship: *1/2
Men in Black 3: **1/2
Snow White & the Huntsman: **

Pop Trash
06-03-2012, 05:55 AM
Since when do we call her KStew now?

Yeah, that's some seriously annoying London tabloid bullshit. Anyway I liked "KStew" in Adventureland fwiw. Her weird awkward fidgety thing in that worked for me.

Kurosawa Fan
06-03-2012, 02:33 PM
Since when do we call her KStew now?

Since she sucks and deserves a shitty nickname.

Raiders
06-03-2012, 02:44 PM
This was so awful. Theron's Queen has to be one of the most horribly inspired and performed characters in a long, long time.

Kurosawa Fan
06-03-2012, 03:35 PM
And if the damn queen can simply change shape and just find Snow White in an instant, why didn't she do that right away and save us an hour?

Seriously. I think I had more fun envisioning the eventual porn parody.



See, I thought this in the theater, and then when the queen returned all wasted and crawling in the black muck, reaching for the mirror, I assumed she could have done it, but that it would have wasted all of her power, since it was explained that her power was waning since Snow White came of age, and so she only did it once every other resource has been expended, purely out of desperation. Cool, well explained. Then she miraculously recovers from her oil slick state by sucking face with countless village girls, and seems more powerful than ever for the final showdown. This begs the question: why wasn't she just doing that all along? Why didn't she just have a steady stream of village girls coming and going for face-sucking purposes (it's implied, but we only see one, and then she ages and weakens and never goes back to that life-restoring well until she's near death)? Why didn't she keep her brother in the castle, round up a bunch of village girls, turn into her storm of crows, hunt down Snow White and take her heart, and if unsuccessful, come back, suck face, give it another go, etc? Repeat ad nauseum until Snow White is dead. They killed their own explanation.

Seriously, this movie was sooooooo stupid.

Spinal
06-03-2012, 04:40 PM
I was on the fence about seeing this one. Looks like I can safely miss it.

MadMan
06-03-2012, 06:37 PM
I thought it looked like a really shitty movie from the get go. Too bad considering I like Theron as an actress and the movie's banners/posters were really cool. Maybe that's another sign that a movie might suck: the advertising campaign is operating on full speed ahead.

Wryan
06-03-2012, 10:52 PM
I thought it was okay. There are a lot of elements that they could have gone cliche on but didn't. There are some great visuals and use of special effects. Someone mentioned the dwarves, but I kind of loved how successfully they dwarfized Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones (half), Eddie Marsan, Nick Frost and Bob Hoskins. They collectively probably had the best acting. Theron is turned up to 11 but probably could have benefitted from fewer lines because she glowers well. Yes on the shameless cribbing of Princess Mononoke. What's up the the shoehorning of Judeo-Christian elements into a Grimm tale? I don't recall that ever being a consideration. Stewart looks pained all the time. I liked Hemsworth.

Hilariously awful pep talk by Stewart before the final battle. However, I liked that they ended without making her choose between the two men. I liked that they didn't make it an easy action for her to jump back into a relationship she remembered from childhood. And I LOVED that the queen's brother spies on her talking to thin air, setting up the obvious implication. A throwaway moment, sure, but I found that an interesting tweak on the familiar story. Not sure what to do with the queen's brother character. Nice to see he wasn't inept though.

Skitch
06-04-2012, 04:21 AM
Why do I want this to fail so bad? Oh right, Kristen Stewart.

Sxottlan
06-04-2012, 09:57 AM
And I LOVED that the queen's brother spies on her talking to thin air, setting up the obvious implication.

I guess I'm not getting what was the implication. That the man in the mirror was actually just a representation of her insecurities?

Wryan
06-04-2012, 01:16 PM
I guess I'm not getting what was the implication. That the man in the mirror was actually just a representation of her insecurities?

Yes more or less. That the mirror does nothing (like when she appears later, weakened, coming back from the William disguise and reaches out to the mirror and it does nothing to help her). That she is, well, obviously a bit touched anyway, but I thought it added a nice suggestion.

EyesWideOpen
06-06-2012, 03:00 AM
I thought this was really good. I was dreading a Hollywood action movie and this had a lot of quiet understated moments and some really nice forest scenes.

And if you guys were actually paying attention pretty much every "story" complaint in this thread was quite easily explained in the film. I mean c'mon this isn't Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy where you had to pay that close attention.

eternity
06-06-2012, 06:02 AM
I thought this was really good. I was dreading a Hollywood action movie and this had a lot of quiet understated moments and some really nice forest scenes.

And if you guys were actually paying attention pretty much every "story" complaint in this thread was quite easily explained in the film. I mean c'mon this isn't Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy where you had to pay that close attention.

There isn't a story. There are a couple plot threads pulled from the Snow White story thrown in to remind us that it's a Snow White movie, but otherwise they just hang there. The more you pay attention, the more obvious it is just how badly written this, ahem, "story" is.

EyesWideOpen
06-06-2012, 01:10 PM
There isn't a story. There are a couple plot threads pulled from the Snow White story thrown in to remind us that it's a Snow White movie, but otherwise they just hang there. The more you pay attention, the more obvious it is just how badly written this, ahem, "story" is.

If you didn't think there "was a story" that's on you but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people complaning about "inconsistencies" that were explained in the film if you were paying attention.

Kurosawa Fan
06-06-2012, 06:33 PM
If you didn't think there "was a story" that's on you but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people complaning about "inconsistencies" that were explained in the film if you were paying attention.

Use moments from the film to explain the queen turning into a flock of crows and locating Snow White at that point in the narrative, and not using it right from the jump. Explain the queen not just walking up to the tower and taking Snow White's heart as soon as the mirror reveals that it will give her eternal life. Or the threat of the queen getting close to death, with her power weakening, only to restore herself for the final battle by sucking face with girls, as though she couldn't have been doing that all along. These are all stupid contrivances that were given either flimsy explanations, or no explanation at all.

EyesWideOpen
06-06-2012, 07:11 PM
Use moments from the film to explain the queen turning into a flock of crows and locating Snow White at that point in the narrative, and not using it right from the jump. Explain the queen not just walking up to the tower and taking Snow White's heart as soon as the mirror reveals that it will give her eternal life. Or the threat of the queen getting close to death, with her power weakening, only to restore herself for the final battle by sucking face with girls, as though she couldn't have been doing that all along. These are all stupid contrivances that were given either flimsy explanations, or no explanation at all.

All those were addressed in the film. I'll elaborate when I have access to a computer and I'm not on a cell phone.

EyesWideOpen
06-07-2012, 12:02 AM
Trying to answer questions:

"Why doesn't the Queen just walk up to the tower and take Snow White's heart?"

She basically does. As soon as the Mirror tells her about eating Snow's heart she sends her brother to fetch her. She is shown in the story as preferring to stay in her room and send her brother to do her dirty work for her. She doesn't have any reason to think that a young girl who has been stuck in a tower for years would have a weapon and be able to escape out of the castle.

"Use moments from the film to explain the queen turning into a flock of crows and locating Snow White at that point in the narrative, and not using it right from the jump."

The Queen doesn't find out that Snow has escaped until her brother returns and says she has escaped to the dark forest. The Queen says her power is weak in the dark forest and sends her brother and the huntsman to get her. Her power is steadily weakning so she doesn't want to use her magic until she has to which is when her brother dies. She had no reason to think that her brother and the huntsman weren't going to be able to retreive Snow. It isn't until Snow is out of the dark forest that the Queen uses her magic (knowing her brother is dead and can't help her) and does the whole flock of crows thing. She is in dire straits at that point.

"Or the threat of the queen getting close to death, with her power weakening, only to restore herself for the final battle by sucking face with girls, as though she couldn't have been doing that all along."

It's mentioned by the Mirror that until she gets Snow's heart her power is going to fade away. In the beginning it took one girl to heal her, in the scene near the end it took a whole room of girls to heal her. Just killing that one guy when she stopped his heart took a ton out of her. You guys seem to think she was in New York with thousands of pretty girls to steal their beauty from. They showed the village of girls who had cut themselves so they weren't beautiful and the Queen couldn't get anything from them. She was running out of pretty girls. There were no scenes in the movie where there were tons of pretty girls running around the village. The inside of her castle and the village were pretty bare of girls in general at that point since she had already ran through them. By using all those girls near the end and filling her power back up it was a last ditch effort since Snow was storming the castle and the Queen knew this was basically her last stand to get Snow's heart or else she was soon going to be out of magic.

Kurosawa Fan
06-07-2012, 03:53 AM
Trying to answer questions:

"Why doesn't the Queen just walk up to the tower and take Snow White's heart?"

She basically does. As soon as the Mirror tells her about eating Snow's heart she sends her brother to fetch her. She is shown in the story as preferring to stay in her room and send her brother to do her dirty work for her. She doesn't have any reason to think that a young girl who has been stuck in a tower for years would have a weapon and be able to escape out of the castle.

If I knew that immortality was a heart away, I wouldn't send my brother on the errand to fetch her. I'd just go up to her cell, cut out her heart and be done with it. It's a flimsy excuse. There's no point to sending the brother up there other than to give Snow White an opportunity to escape. And why only one person? Send a bunch of men to usher her to the queen's chamber if going up the steps of the tower is such an inconvenience. Why risk her escape by sending one friggin guy to bring her down when she's going to understand her life is at stake, considering she's seen the girls brought back as senior citizens in her time in captivity. Also, her brother sure seems weak in that scene in the cell compared to later moments in the film.


"Use moments from the film to explain the queen turning into a flock of crows and locating Snow White at that point in the narrative, and not using it right from the jump."

The Queen doesn't find out that Snow has escaped until her brother returns and says she has escaped to the dark forest. The Queen says her power is weak in the dark forest and sends her brother and the huntsman to get her. Her power is steadily weakning so she doesn't want to use her magic until she has to which is when her brother dies. She had no reason to think that her brother and the huntsman weren't going to be able to retreive Snow. It isn't until Snow is out of the dark forest that the Queen uses her magic (knowing her brother is dead and can't help her) and does the whole flock of crows thing. She is in dire straits at that point.She was out of the dark forest a long time before the queen decided to employ this tactic, and all the while the queen was wasting away. Again, it's a very poor excuse to stretch out the story. There's no logical explanation. As for the girls, why not use one at a time along the way so she doesn't wither to almost nothing? And who brought her the girls when she came back a near-skeleton from her failed attempt to kill Snow White? Her brother was dead. And why use them all up for a showdown that she wasn't even sure was going to take place? Snow White was safely tucked away in that other castle, and could have easily spent her years there in safety. The queen obviously isn't omniscient, so she didn't know Snow would be coming for her with an army. Up to that point Snow had been doing nothing other than fleeing. In fact, last the queen knew, Snow was dead from the apple. Again, no explanations, just flimsy, hole-ridden storytelling.

"Or the threat of the queen getting close to death, with her power weakening, only to restore herself for the final battle by sucking face with girls, as though she couldn't have been doing that all along."

It's mentioned by the Mirror that until she gets Snow's heart her power is going to fade away. In the beginning it took one girl to heal her, in the scene near the end it took a whole room of girls to heal her. Just killing that one guy when she stopped his heart took a ton out of her. You guys seem to think she was in New York with thousands of pretty girls to steal their beauty from. They showed the village of girls who had cut themselves so they weren't beautiful and the Queen couldn't get anything from them. She was running out of pretty girls. There were no scenes in the movie where there were tons of pretty girls running around the village. The inside of her castle and the village were pretty bare of girls in general at that point since she had already ran through them. By using all those girls near the end and filling her power back up it was a last ditch effort since Snow was storming the castle and the Queen knew this was basically her last stand to get Snow's heart or else she was soon going to be out of magic.[/quote]

See above. I'll grant you that there weren't many pretty girls left, but if she had continued using them continuously she would have had more strength throughout the film. Only then the film wouldn't have had more "Oh noes, the queen is withering away! Look at how old she really should be!" shots, with Theron hamming it up for the screen.

EyesWideOpen
06-07-2012, 12:25 PM
If I knew that immortality was a heart away, I wouldn't send my brother on the errand to fetch her. I'd just go up to her cell, cut out her heart and be done with it. It's a flimsy excuse. There's no point to sending the brother up there other than to give Snow White an opportunity to escape. And why only one person? Send a bunch of men to usher her to the queen's chamber if going up the steps of the tower is such an inconvenience. Why risk her escape by sending one friggin guy to bring her down when she's going to understand her life is at stake, considering she's seen the girls brought back as senior citizens in her time in captivity. Also, her brother sure seems weak in that scene in the cell compared to later moments in the film.

Once again, she had no reason to think Snow was going to be any different then the other girls and no trouble for her brother to bring to her. Of course in retrospect knowing what happens she would have sent a group of men to get her.

She was out of the dark forest a long time before the queen decided to employ this tactic, and all the while the queen was wasting away. Again, it's a very poor excuse to stretch out the story. There's no logical explanation. As for the girls, why not use one at a time along the way so she doesn't wither to almost nothing? And who brought her the girls when she came back a near-skeleton from her failed attempt to kill Snow White? Her brother was dead. And why use them all up for a showdown that she wasn't even sure was going to take place? Snow White was safely tucked away in that other castle, and could have easily spent her years there in safety. The queen obviously isn't omniscient, so she didn't know Snow would be coming for her with an army. Up to that point Snow had been doing nothing other than fleeing. In fact, last the queen knew, Snow was dead from the apple. Again, no explanations, just flimsy, hole-ridden storytelling.

The logical explanation is that her magic is waning and she needs to conserve it. It isn't until her brother is dead that she has no other choice. Of course she knew Snow would return. The Queen murdered her father and stole her kingdom.


See above. I'll grant you that there weren't many pretty girls left, but if she had continued using them continuously she would have had more strength throughout the film. Only then the film wouldn't have had more "Oh noes, the queen is withering away! Look at how old she really should be!" shots, with Theron hamming it up for the screen.

But she didn't need more strength throughout the film. She needed more strength when it was time to take Snow's heart.



It seems more like you're nitpicking plot contrivances that are in almost every movie where they are trying to move the characters from point a to point b.

Kurosawa Fan
06-07-2012, 02:23 PM
Call it nitpicking if you want, but when there are this many examples, it's just poor writing.

D_Davis
06-07-2012, 04:30 PM
I haven't seen this, but I think that KF might have experienced what I call a failure to be engaged. Normally, I am not nit-picky when it comes to plot. However, if the film fails to engage me on any level, I then start to nitpick the plot and pick it a part, piece by piece simply because I need something to do with my brain while watching. If I am engaged with a film I can let slide any number of huge plot holes and other such things. A film that I experienced this on was Pan's Labyrinth. There were a ton of little things in that film that annoyed the hell out of me, and I only noticed them because I wasn't engaged at all by the film.

EyesWideOpen
06-07-2012, 04:46 PM
I haven't seen this, but I think that KF might have experienced what I call a failure to be engaged. Normally, I am not nit-picky when it comes to plot. However, if the film fails to engage me on any level, I then start to nitpick the plot and pick it a part, piece by piece simply because I need something to do with my brain while watching. If I am engaged with a film I can let slide any number of huge plot holes and other such things. A film that I experienced this on was Pan's Labyrinth. There were a ton of little things in that film that annoyed the hell out of me, and I only noticed them because I wasn't engaged at all by the film.

My point was that they weren't plot holes. It was explained in the film on pretty much every complaint in this thread. Saying that you wouldn't have made the same decision as a character does is a complaint you could level at every movie.

TGM
06-08-2012, 02:13 AM
Yeah, the movie definitely has some issues, but it wasn't anything that deterred my enjoyment of it. I liked it well enough.

Dukefrukem
09-18-2012, 10:53 PM
this may be the best looking bluray transfer ive ever seen

Henry Gale
09-21-2012, 07:28 PM
This movie seems like it was conceived just to put together good-looking promotional materials, since the best things in it are some really impressive, and some cool, but ultimately fleeting, visual moments and ideas, but I'd also seen the majority of them in the trailers and TV spots. Even funnier now that I look back at those trailers and notice a bunch of shots aren't anywhere to be found in the final film or the extended cut.

-63xtK0sO1k

So maybe it wasn't the script's fault that so little of it flows in a way that lets its plotting make sense with any ease. It could have easily been behind the scenes tampering in the editing room to keep this thing around two hours, or possibly to even mold a narrative through line that pleased the studio more than what was assumed through filming. But whatever it is, the general pacing of the cutting from shot to shot, scene to scene, all feels so exhausting quick, as if they were trying to cut corners anywhere they could.

And I can sort of see both sides of what KF and EWO were going back and forth on before. There probably were very brief moments that could help explain a lot of what seem like gaping plot holes, but the movie just doesn't make those explanations stand out enough to justify how the script designed the story to haphazardly stumble into those plot points the way it does. Plus, if the rest of it were stronger, I'd probably give those problematic moments the benefit of the doubt, but there's just not much beneath that surface to connect to.

Like for instance, the queen draining all those girls to restore her beauty. I understand how things like the village girls scarring themselves so the queen wouldn't target them and them being used as a hard-to-find last resort could make sense (though having a room of them weakens that argument), but the movie doesn't make it seem like she's going after the girls for their beauty, it just seems like she's draining their youth. We see Lily Cole's character get morphed into a seemingly elderly woman, though still alive in her cell as Stewart escapes. But then at the very end of the movie, after the queen has died, we see she's back to normal.

So in the end, other than a bunch of brief "oooh, aaah" moments that stem from its cinematography, production design and visual effects, and a scene with the Huntsman and a "dead" Snow White that sticks out as the rare piece of the film that doesn't feel like it's rushing, especially through its character development, and pays off with maybe the only emotionally resonant scene in the whole film (which I'll credit to Hemsworth since he's the only thing in the scene that moves or speaks); there's just not all that much to bother remembering here. If sequels or spin-offs end up getting made, this is going to be some confusingly empty and sluggish catch-up work for people who still care.

** / C

Sven
03-18-2013, 10:43 AM
Oof. Probably the most boring second half of any movie I've seen.

Sven
03-18-2013, 10:48 AM
Splattercrow witch was amazing, however.

Ezee E
04-12-2013, 07:08 PM
You can tell Rupert Sanders comes from special effects and commercials. He does a great job at making this look epic. The special effects are phenomenal, and the creatures are all interesting to look at. The atmosphere was just right.

Sanders just has no sense of pacing or storytelling. There's not much to like out of this movie except that it looks far better then it ever should. Kristen Stewart, someone I think is more then capable of a good performance with the right director, is a snoozefest. Charlize Theron does what she can, but her character is never really given the villainous scenes that she needs, she always pawns it of onto others to do her work, until it's too late... Disappointing, because there is potential for something great I think.

Gizmo
04-20-2013, 03:08 AM
Forgot I watched this a week or 2 ago until I saw it still in my DVR list. It was that memorable...

Dukefrukem
11-19-2015, 01:38 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W65ndip7MM

TGM
11-19-2015, 02:17 AM
Maleficent was already a shittier, grittier, live action version of Frozen, so it makes sense that its producers would still be after that same thing here...