Big Screen Peter: Snow White and the Huntsman

Hollywood's second Snow White vehicle of the spring was released this past weekend.  The first — Mirror, Mirror — was a wretched waste of time, completely disfiguring the tone of the original story for an inane blend of hokey sentimentality.

Fortunately, this second picture — Snow White and the Huntsman — is a vast improvement, as it retains a much darker overtone that is more true to the spirit of the Brothers Grimm.

The problem is that there is a gaping chasm between being great and simply being an improvement over Hollywood's equivalent to pink slime.

The story, as most probably know, revolves around the fairest of them all: Snow White, being played here by Kristen Stewart.

A paragon of purity and innocence, she is beset by the wickedness of an evil queen who seeks to retain her own beauty by harvesting the youth of other girls. In Snow White, the wicked queen has her key to eternal beauty. The meat of the story is set in motion as Snow White escapes the clutches of the evil queen. In turn, the furious queen sends off her minions to capture Snow White alive so that she may steal her youth and ensure her own beauteous longevity.

That aspect of the plot line is rather easy to abide. It's in the ancillary characters of the story that the filmmakers falter. For instance, the creators toss multiple love interests into the stage — William, a noble youth that presumes Snow White dead and the titular Huntsman, played by Chris Hemsworth.

One might assume this plot convention would be born from a desire to sow some sort of amorous tension (or perhaps that Kristen Stewart, the star of the Twilight series, is best served when torn between two possible beaus), but this conceit is anathema to the construct of the Snow White narrative.

Certainly nothing is achieved from the arrangement, as the plot device only serves to convolute the movie's action. Which perhaps points to a greater problem within the movie: an underlying uncertainty surrounding the character of Snow White. Is she paragon or paramour? The filmmakers oscillate throughout.

Further, they seem at times to lose track of their own construction. In one attempt at illustrating the fealty felt for the rightful queen, we witness a particularly smitten dwarf take an arrow for Snow White. The resulting death gives the director Rupert Sanders a chance to work in a level of cheap pathos as Snow White and her companions stand around a burning funeral pyre singing what one must assume is some medieval ballad of poignant despair.

While the attempt at ensuring some level of sentimentality remains in the movie, the scene strains credulity. For if the wicked queen specifically needs Snow White alive, why was an arrow ever shot in her direction?

Though there is admirable work done with the darker, fantastical aspects of the fairy tale, it's amateurish inconsistencies like that which mar the production and keep it from achieving any measure of greatness.