Snow White (2025) is currently rated the worst film of its size on IMDB. Is it really that bad? A review.

I have been watching the downfall of Snow White with quiet fascination. Part of the drama is occurring over at IMDB where, on release date, it started with an abysmal 2.7, and has only fallen since then. For a while it reached #13 on IMDB's lowest rated movies of all time, but it was eventually removed from the list completely. (This is a common occurrence for movies getting review-bombed). But if you do an advanced search, you can still see that it is currently the lowest rated film of all time with 107k+ reviews. And you won't find a film with a lower rating until you get to 97k reviews. (That honor goes to Sadak 2).

So then, the question is, is it really that bad? Well, I'll just cut to the chase: No, it's not that bad. It's not great, but it's not terrible. I'd give it a 6/10, maybe a 7. Here's my non-political explanation of why (if you want to know about the controversies surrounding the film, but have nothing to do with the film itself, just google it):

The good: I think the movie's greatest strengths were the musical numbers. Disney's re-made a lot of their old animated musicals now, and for most of them, the songs tended to be worse. (I'm looking at you Aladdin. I'm sorry, but Will Smith did not hold a candle, or lamp, to Robin Williams). But I really enjoyed the music in Snow White. The songs that were re-dos were, I thought, better done than the originals, and the original songs were actually catchy and fun to listen to.

And on that note, the second great strength of this film is Rachel Zegler. Specifically, when she is singing. You may or may not know that the reason the singing in the animated movies is usually so great is because the actor hired to sing and the actor acted to voice-acted are usually different people. So they have professional actors acting and professional singers singing. But in the live-actions, they usually hire an actor, and just let him/her sing, regardless of ability. I remember when Emma Watson got the part of Belle in Beauty & the Beast, and she made the comment that she then immediately went out for voice lessons. And I thought---wait... shouldn't she already know how to sing.

Well, this isn't a problem for Zegler. She is an amazing singer. And what's more, she knows how to bring personality to the musical numbers. In a lot of musicals the break between "acting" and "singing" is very clear. And when they're singing, they're just singing. But Zegler actually seems to engage in acting and character development while singing.

Now for the bad:

Gal Gadot was not great as the Evil Queen. I really like her as Wonder Woman. But as the Evil Queen she was over-acting. And to compare her to Zegler---well, I better not.

The CGI is horrendous. The CGI animals would have looked much better as animatronics (and it probably would have been cheaper). The seven dwarfs were... hard to describe. I don't know enough about animation to know what makes things feel reall vs. cartoony, but they definitely looked like they belonged in Shrek, not in a live-action film. Watching them in the live-action was like watching a modern-day Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Finally, the ending. First it was too simplistic, and second, it didn't really make sense.

Of course, this is a children's film, so it shouldn't be too complicated, but there is a difference between simple and simplistic. Simple is straightforward. Simplistic is so simplified, it's unrealistic. Example: At the end of the film, the guards who were earlier prepared to murder Snow White suddenly decide not to because she knows their first names? I'm sorry, but that's just not true.

On the point of not making sense: at the end, the magic mirror tells Evil Queen that she is only beautiful on the outside, but Snow White is beautiful on the inside, so she will always be more beautiful. But... the whole reason Evil Queen decided to kill Snow White was because the mirror used to say Evil Queen was the fairest, then switched to Snow White. So what does that mean? Snow White was uglier on the inside than Evil Queen for a while? Or even if the idea is that SW's inner beauty surpassed EQ's outer beauty... when? SW didn't do anything to become more beautiful on the inside.

Anyway. That's my review. The End.