Snow
white and the huntsman
So I saw Snow White and the Huntsman today with my Dad and
brother for fathers day and it was a pretty bad movie all around.
STORY
First off, the writing was bad. It
was a weak series of plot points spread far and thin, there weren’t any major
events really, it was mostly just a bunch of filler and unnecessary action for
special effects to take place. There really wasn’t any plot going on and the
events seemed unrelated for the most part (Like, lets put a troll in this scene
because we can.)
Secondly, the scenes didn’t really
Segway into one another and the intercutting of scenes was also weak and didn’t
intensify it at all. Set ups and payoffs were few and far between as well.
On a more important note, there was
very little theme expressed in the movie. Whenever there was a moral debate being
questioned, it was told through extremely on-the-nose dialogue. The writing had
very little subtlety or tact. In fact, the characters were very one-dimensional
and too much time was spent trying to give them some sort of backstory rather
than progressing their inner moral growth.
What bothers me the most is that
they had this whole world to build and they squandered it. When creating a
fantasy film, the possibilities are endless. There are infinite existentialist
ways of telling your story and being as creative as possible, but these
Hollywood big-budget buttholes used a stencil to write this script.
They had this whole other world to
create with its own set of rules and laws and magic but they didn’t do anything
with it. There was no “magic comes at a price” or law of equivalent exchange,
sense of karma, or any sort of world-view like that. The entire movie was just
the same as putting babies on spikes for 2 hours with the only reason being
because she is evil and jealous.
This movie was already a pre-sold
franchise with being an adaptation with a handful of top stars as well as
publicity and trends from shows like Once Upon a Time. They had so much
potential to run with it however they wanted and to extrapolate the story so
much further, but they completely fell short.
All in all, very poor writing.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
The lighting was somewhat
interesting by the fact that it wasn’t. I noticed that most of the movie was
trending to current camera schemes and what seems to be becoming a cliché trend
of current technology.
As many of you may know, digital
has had a much shorter latitude than film until recent years. In effect, many
digital narratives have used large silks or Kino-flos to get better gradients
and somewhat emulate the look of film. Cameras are also advancing today to get
wider latitudes, and in effect, Snow White and the Huntsman ended up looking
very flat.
In the films defense, an
interesting thing they did was light the characters eyes to tell their emotion
(very much like how they did in the avengers) since they eyes are a sort of
window to the soul, which also makes sense as to why the lighting looked so
flat.
In Hollywood, it used to be “light
the actors, not the set”, now it seems to be, “Light their eyes and the rest
will take care of itself.” I find this true for melo-dramas and soap operas,
but it doesn’t work with trying to be cinematic, particularly when it comes to
choosing camera angles.
Most shots were eye-level close
chest shots and medium-wides. I found this very boring cinematically since camera
placement plays a huge role in visually telling the story. I think their focus
was in the wrong place.
Occasionally there would be a cool
shot here or there that may have been a birds eye shot from a helicopter or
some time lapse on a slider, but I found these to be more distracting from the
other shots rather than adding anything to the story. the shots would work much
better as photographs, but they were distracting when cut with the other (quite
objective) shots. I also believe this also further disrupted the rhythm of the
cutting of the film for the editor.
EDITING
I feel that the editor didn’t have
much say in how the film was edited. There were many shots that should have
been left out, but the director or producer was probably pulling the strings
while remembering how expensive each of those unnecessary shots was.
This also had a large effect on how
the editor kept on cutting back to stale footage. Where the director should
have chosen to push in for an intense moment or pull out to make it more
intimate, he instead shot some “pretty” shots so the editing would go from a
close up to an extremely wide helicopter shot, then back to the same close up.
Most good movies would either choose
to intensify it, or pull back.
OTHER
As for acting, the best acting of the film was from Charlize Theron, who
half the time was just yelling at the camera.
A film theorist (I believe it was
Bazin) had once said that the more we show in our films, the more we spell out
to the audience, the less involved they will get. A great example is jaws, we
get pretty absorbed into it through most of the film, then when we see the
cheesy pain-in-the-ass mechanical shark.
This film went terribly overboard
on special effects. Instead of just biting a poisonous apple and seeing it’s
effect on Snow, we have to go into a dream sequence of the apple falling and
turning into a hedgehog instead. This is one instance of many which had the
sole purpose of showing “cool” special effects, which distracted from the story
and ruined the shot selection/rhythm of the film.
A couple of the shots looked kinda cool, but you might as
well just watch the trailer. It is actually a very good trailer which has all
the best shots in it, and it will be much more worth your time and money to
just watch the trailer then go buy a book like Jurassic park or something.
