Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders)

[EyesWideOpen]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Call it nitpicking if you want, but when there are this many examples, it's just poor writing.

[D_Davis]

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]

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]

Yeah, the movie definitely has some issues, but it wasn't anything that deterred my enjoyment of it. I liked it well enough.

[Dukefrukem]

this may be the best looking bluray transfer ive ever seen

[Henry Gale]

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.

[youtube]-63xtK0sO1k[/youtube]

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]

Oof. Probably the most boring second half of any movie I've seen.

[Sven]

Splattercrow witch was amazing, however.

[Ezee E]

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]

Forgot I watched this a week or 2 ago until I saw it still in my DVR list. It was that memorable...

[Dukefrukem]

[TGM]

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...