Monday, April 29, 2013

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

After murdering the King on their wedding night, the evil Queen throws little Snow White in the dungeon and takes over the kingdom. Years later, Snow White is an adult and escapes from the dungeon into the dark forest.

The Queen hires a Huntsman to track her down. The Queen's brother and his goons accompany him on his quest, promising a reward when the task is completed. But once he locates his target he is immediately betrayed so he let's Snow White go. When he meets her again, she promises to pay him to help her escape.

They run through the forest, meet some dwarves, go to Fairyland, get chased by the evil goons, and Snow White ends up eating a poisoned apple from the Queen who has shape shifted into her long lost childhood friend.  This begs the question if the Queen can shape shift and find Snow White at a random campsite, then why didn't she just take care of this herself rather than put in motion this whole mess when she hired the Huntsman?

The movie looks fantastic.  The make up, scenery, effects, sets, and everything is top notch.  The most impressive effects are the mirror as a flowing liquid/person form, plus the birds flying in through the roof to splat into a puddle on the floor and then out of the puddle  crawls the Queen looking like black liquid.

Also the actors who played the dwarves, such as Nick Frost, are flawlessly imaged as dwarves. No idea  how they did that, but it is amazing. If you didn't recognize the actors, you'd think they were played by midgets. Did they squash them in post?  Add their heads onto real midget bodies? Is it all cgi?  I don't know but it looks great.

Charlize Theron chews the scenery as the Evil Queen. She's quite good and over the top, which perhaps is due to the vacuum that is Kristin Stewart as Snow White, who only has two expressions - mouth open or mouth closed. My friend Tristan mentioned her expression always looks like she's put her hand in something icky and is hoping no one notices. Spot on, my friend, spot on.

As for the entertainment factor, although it's visually appealing, it's not very exciting and the movie based on a board game Battleship movie was more enjoyable.  Not because it was better, but because it was worse, so much ridiculously worse.

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