Hollywood's lack of originality continues, with the premier of Snow White and the Huntsman.
I almost didn't go see it. Not because I didn't want to, but because my funds are a bit thin this month due to some unforeseen expenses. But I did, and you're now glad I did, because I'm writing this post, literally five minutes after I got home.
Could they have stolen from any more films? The answer is yes, because they totally missed out on stealing from The Princess Bride. If only somebody had said "Aaaaaasssss yyyyooooouuuuuu wwiiiiiiiiiiiish" while rolling down a hill, then the plagiarism would be complete. Alas.
So. Movie starts of promisingly enough with a brief narration of the early parts of the Snow White fairy tale as most know it: Queen wishes for a beautiful daughter, Queen has a beautiful daughter, Queen passes away from an illness.
Then things start to get positively strange stolen. First, you see a young Snow White playing with a young boy named William (who, you will later learn, is the Duke's son). They look just like the two young characters from the beginning of Red Riding Hood, except that instead of killing bunnies, they are saving an injured bird.
Now the story starts to really split off from the original fairy tale. A weird "dark army" appears nearby, apparently taking advantage of the King's grief over the death of his wife. He and his forces ride out to meet the dark army, which looks suspiciously like it's made up of Necromongers. The King's forces attack, and the army disintegrates around them, turning into shards of obsidian or something. They find, in the aftermath of the "battle," the prisoner carriage from Season of the Witch.
Surprisingly, Nicolas Cage does NOT make an appearance in this film.
Of course the King falls in love with the beautiful woman imprisoned in the carriage, but if you were paying attention during Season of the Witch, you know she's a witch and may we burn her? (They don't.)
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| They didn't get better, either. |
Now, I don't seem to recall this portion of the original fairy tale, but the new Queen, on their wedding night, stabs the King in the heart, steals his life force, and then opens the portcullis to admit her own army, who quickly take over the castle. The young Snow White, upon seeing her father's body, flees from the Queen. The Duke attempts to ride off with his son and Snow White, but Snow White's body guard and shot and killed from his horse, and while the Duke and William escape, Snow White is trapped when the portcullis falls and is seized by the Queen's men.
Fast forward ten years or so. The new Queen - her name is Ravenna, by the way - has pretty much poisoned the land. You soon learn that she's rather like the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal - or perhaps more like the mother-son duo from Sleepwalkers. She drains the life force of young women (and sometimes men) in order to maintain her youth. She also has a brother, and for a wild moment I thought they were actually going to start stealing from A Game of Thrones - but if they did, they didn't film it (thank God, because the brother was about as appealing as Joffrey). You also learn that Snow White has been imprisoned in the tallest tower all these years, and while Ravenna hasn't drained her life yet, she clearly drained her acting skills, because you realize she's just Bella, from Twilight.
In the meantime, Ravenna finally figures out that Snow White is ruining her youthful looks, apparently by just being alive. So she sends her brother to bring her from the tower where she's been imprisoned, but Bella manages to escape and lock the brother in the cell. She flees to the courtyard, and makes her escape down - of all things - a garbage chute (a-la Star Wars). And remember the injured bird she saved? Well, it makes an appearance now, leading her to where a beautiful white horse lays waiting for her.
She rides off and now we're just in Lord of the Rings because it's a girl....riding a white horse...pursued by riders in black. Yeah. OK. So, she rides and rides until she comes to a dark, misty forest. The horse gallops straight into a marshy area and....holy crap! Good going, Bella. You just lost Artax in the Swamps of Sadness. Thank you for forcing me to relive that traumatic cinematic moment from my childhood. Again.
Bella runs off, trips, falls (just like Bella to trip and fall, right?), and apparently triggers some weird mushroom spoor stuff to come billowing out. Reminds me of Katniss and the Tracker-Jacker venom in The Hunger Games. More plagiarism. Does it never end? (That's right...it's The Neverending Story Plagiarism.)
While Bella's out having a bad LSD trip in the spooky forest, the Queen is right pissed at her brother and tells him to go find somebody to hunt the girl down. He finds a drunken Boromir in a fight with Jaws from Moonraker, sobers him up in the horse trough, and takes him to the Queen. Ravenna promises the huntsman that she will bring his dead wife back to life if he brings back her "missing prisoner." He reluctantly agrees to go, and sets off with Joffrey and a few hired hands. They head into the Dark Forest (ooooo, spooky). He might be Boromir, but he tracks like Aragorn, and tells the Queen's men to "wait here." They don't, and it's only because the writers clearly didn't recognize the foreshadowing that they don't wind up sinking into the swamp themselves.
Bella, meanwhile, has awakened and tried to run, but Boromir catches up to her. He ditches Joffrey and company and leads the way out of the Dark Forest, toward the Duke's castle and renegade army. While crossing over a bridge, they wake up a troll, but Bella just stares at him until the blandness of her acting makes him too lethargic to kill anybody; he goes back to sleep, and our characters continue on their way.
They are sheltered for the night by a community of women who have slashed their cheeks so that the Queen won't steal their beauty. But the settlement is attacked and Boromir and Bella flee, where they run into a bunch of Dwarfs, who apparently have a score to settle with Boromir - probably because he's been carrying Gimli's axe the whole movie. While all this is going on, William - the Duke's son - learns from a peasant who escaped from the Queen's castle that Snow White is still alive and has escaped, so he grabs his Legolas bow and poses as a bowman-for-hire and joins Joffrey's motley band of Bella-hunters.
Anyway, the Dwarves hide the fugitives in a place called "Sanctuary" - which is supposed to be the home of the fairies, but it looks way too much like Narnia turning from winter into spring - and then the really terrifying moment when Bella wanders through the woods toward the rising sunlight, and one of the dwarves says, "It's just Him" and by God you are expecting Aslan to show up, but instead it's just a white deer with tree branches for antlers. I mean, this deer looked really freaking stupid. He'd look even stupider as a head mounted on the wall, but clearly somebody thought otherwise because he's suddenly shot with an arrow.
Ah, that would be Joffrey and his band of not-so-merry-at-this-point men. They have tracked their quarry to "Sanctuary" and set about trying to capture Snow White (again). Boromir fights Joffrey and impales him on a tree; he begs his sister to heal him with her power, but she's a jealous little thing and doesn't like to share her Botox. Joffrey dies, and William hooks up with everyone, and the whole lot of them head off toward the Duke's stronghold, which is apparently somewhere in Rohan.
Then, early one morning, Bella is wandering through the woods (didn't Edward tell her to not wander through the woods? See, this is what happens!) and turns to see William. The apple from Twilight makes an appearance, and Bella eats it, but - you guessed it! - the apple was poisoned and "William" is really Ravenna, who gets ready to kill Bella but the real William and Boromir interrupt her. William kisses Bella, but nothing happens, so they agree to continue on. They carry her to the Duke's castle, where they lay her body in state (in a gown apparently purchased en route from the Gap of Rohan). Boromir is drinking again, and ranting on about his wife, and he confesses his love for Snow White, and kisses her. Then he goes off to drown his sorrows, but Bella wakes up, stalks out of the castle in her bare feet, and makes a really lame speech that still causes everyone to salute her.
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| Was it poisoned? Or was Bella a victim of her own acting skills? |
Then she puts on armor, turns into Joan of Arc, they storm the castle, she kills the Queen, and everybody lives happily ever after, except for William, who presumably goes off to sulk because she was probably going to hook up with Boromir in the end.
Or maybe not?
The end.
God help me, when does Prometheus come out?
