I for one was glad to see Kristen Stewart on the silver screen and not having a shining person or a furry one trying to impress her. One reason was because I could see again why I was attracted to this actress many years ago. Another was because she is a better actress than Twilight.
To say that she played a good Snow White would be inaccurate, for this was not really Snow White. But she did give a good performance and I found myself really rooting for her character.
I have to admit that it was a little ironic to see Thor here wielding another weapon that almost resembled a hammer. But performance wise, for the material that was given to Chris Hemsworth, I thought he was solid.
However, it was Charlize Theron who shone the most. I could see why she would do this role. This version of the evil witch was tortured and layered, and Theron gave the role quite a lot.
What went wrong started with director Rupert Sanders. He had the vision in most scenes and had the artistic eye for many shots, but then he suffered from some old fashioned directing. By that I meant like how he introduced the two male leads were simply just trite, especially Sam Claflin's character. I only wished I didn't have to see those scenes.
And while I'm on Claflin, his character did not get enough screen time to be effective. And continuity for certain scenes suffered, such as when he showed up to rescue Stewart to their first real conversation. To nitpick, there was too long a gap for it to be logical. Same goes to the first conversation between Stewart and Hemsworth before the final fight.
Either the director or the writer could not come up with a good enough dialogue for the whole thing to be more impactful and effective.
For a story to still be called "Snow White", in my opinion a few key things should have been kept. For example, and this was a big one, the kiss; which was never properly explained. There are things that can be left to the audience's imagination but there are things that just cannot be. This was one of the latter.
The writers also tried to introduced too many things. The troll and how it was "tamed", that whole sequence was weird and unnecessary. The forest with the faeries also was unnecessary and the most important scene from here could have been written in another way. Cutting the whole running time by fifteen minutes would have been ideal.
And a glaring character flaw was how Snow White could transform over such a short span of time with no training whatsoever into a sword-wielding warrior when she could not and would not even hold a knife at the beginning.
But for the most part, Sanders direction and as a first-timer ought to be lauded. It's the writing that really dropped the ball on this one. Pity too, because there were a lot of good here amidst all the flaws.
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