--Freya, The Huntsman: Winter's War
Snow White and the Huntsman was really more about the huntsman than Snow White, who mentioned that he outlived a wife he cherished. Actually, he was only informally married for less than a calendar day before tragedy befell them, and Ravenna turns out to have had a sister that went unmentioned in the superior preceding movie. The Huntsman: Winter's War is like 300: Rise of an Empire. Both take place partly before and partly after the events of the film before them. It also shares something else with the prequel-sequel to 300: both of them fall short of the movie before them. Winter's War does lack some of the grandness, gravity, and thematic directness of Snow White and the Huntsman. Sometimes it has moments of unecessary levity that are not integrated well with the more serious tone. Rushed and with a somewhat undeveloped character roster, this combintion of prequel and sequel would have been a very poor introduction to this series if it was the first to be released. At the same time, it does bring Emily Blunt into the franchise as Ravenna's cruel sister, though she is wasted along with Jessica Chastain. Not even the scenes with Charlize Theron as Ravenna have the same intensity and sincerity as in the first film. More than that, Winter's War squanders its focus on how the capacity for love brings with it the capacity for regret, betrayal, and pain. A very serious philosophical issue is approached so haphazardly and halfheartedly (or wholeheartedly in a stupid way) that it deviates sharply from the genuine sincerity of the preceding movie. At times its comedy is timed and delivered well, but humor of the shallow, intrusive kind interferes with the execution of the better elements. Also, once again, the extended version is only a few minutes longer than the theatrical cut, so any differences are minimal at best. The slightly prolonged runtime does not erase any of the grave problems.
Production Values
Nowhere near as much is seen of the creatures and bold environments from before, but Freya's ice-based sorcery provides a few new ways to visually explore what was once a spectacular fantasy setting. From an ice mask that Freya uses to spy through the eyes of a white owl to the frost owl itself, there is plenty of pale, cold imagery to contrast well with the dark colors associated with Ravenna in Snow White and the Huntsman. Never, however, is this imagery as overt and consistent as in the first movie. In part for this reason, the sensuality is dampened in early scenes where Eric and Sara, both kidnapped and trained to be lethal warriors under Freya, express their romantic and sexual attraction blossoming out of years of companionship. Unfortunately, almost everything about the story and characterization suffers. With the lessening of the aesthetic quality comes a much lower caliber of dialogue and performances, including from Chris Hemsworth, who was great when he initially inhabited this character. Emily Blunt and Jessica Chastain, like Charlize Theron, can be excellent actresses, but they do not exactly showcase this here. Ralph Ineson of Game of Thrones, The Witch, and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag has a brief role that he of course is great in, ironically doing better with his mere moments of screentime than all the rushed, idiotically comedic or superficial dialogue of the main characters put together. Emily Blunt, Chris Hemsworth, and Jessica Chastain are far more talented than this movie ever hints at.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Before her defeat by Snow White, Ravenna lived with her sister Freya, whom she chastises for the alleged error of loving someone. In this case, it does not work out, as the baby Freya has with her lover is killed, and in sadness and anger, she manifests ice powers and begins a military campaign to the north to gather power. She has her soldiers steal away children to in turn raise as soldiers, killers without compassion or attachment. As they grow into adults, abductees Eric and Sara develop affection for each other as friends and then as romantic lovers, they choose each other as life partners, yet upon trying to escape Queen Freya, they are attacked by her warrior. Freya summons a wall of ice to separate them, with Sara seemingly killed and Eric mistaken for a corpse. During Snow White's later rule, Eric has established himself as a more renowned fighter, and Ravenna's magic mirror has been connected with encroaching ruin. The huntsman is tasked by Snow White to take care of the mirror's threat.
Intellectual Content
Snow White and the Huntsman was about how misogyny and misandry get in the way of love, and Winter's War is about how betrayal or perceived, assumed betrayal can interfere with love. This is actually of course a rather important issue, for whether anything or anyone is worthy or deserving or love, whether one is truly willing to have and commit to love of something important, and the way that love can be mingled with pain are certainly very foundational issues in there own way. Winter's War just fails to really dive into anything about this issue, even as it relates to the romantic love that is the focus of the movie, beyond the bare minimum needed to predictably move the story from one point to another. In a better movie, the parallels between how Freya and Sara fell for the mere illusion that their lovers had betrayed them could have been more explicitly philosophically, emotionally charged, as would the fact that some people (like Freya) would rather cling to the lie that love is itself an illusion than accept that love can come with its own troubles.
So, too, would the way that the men and women of Freya's huntsmen army are almost pressured to bond with each other even as their queen insists that love is a sin deserving punishment and that it is a delusion to be free of. I wonder if Freya really meant what she said about her domain's one law being that no one is to love. Are people free to betray, maim, or rape if only they do not love? Irrationalists like Freya probably do not even think that much about their own stupidity, not that she even begins to examine moral epistemology or metaphysics beyond her own preferences. Her worldview is really just based in emotionalistic bitterness over her own loss of a romantic partnership and child she adored. As deep and life-giving as romantic love can be when shared between true ideological and moral equals (rationalists), it, however, is a lower love than the love of reason, of God, of justice, and of friends of either gender (particularly if all are rationalists), all of which are worth living and killing for. Even if morality and thus justice did not exist, reason, God, and the strength of friendships would, and these are still to varying extents far more fundamental parts of reality than any kind of romantic or sexual love, as philosophically vast and deep and significant as the latter are.
Conclusion
A sequel to a mostly great dark fantasy movie starring Emily Blunt, Chris Hemsworth, Jessica Chastain, and, yes, Charlize Theron could have been so much more than the mostly terrible-to-mediocre follow-up. This stands as a perfect example of how comedy does not need to intrude upon every film in every genre, and when Winter's War was released in 2016, the worst of the then-developing MCU started to taint general filmmaking. Whether the pathetic humor of Chris Hemsworth's 2015 movie Age of Ultron is the reason why Winter's War takes so many major tonal steps backwards is not provable, but the timing does align with when unnatural, forced, stupid humor began surfacing more and more in cinema. That the second Huntsman movie reflects this trend is a tragedy in light of how much more thematically serious, tonally consistent, and aesthetically unique Snow White and the Huntsman is. The flashes of visual brilliance and the depth of the huntsman himself are greatly dimmed, but they do very occasionally shine through, at war with the abysmal direction the rest of the film goes in.
Content:
1. Violence: A hand gets cut off onscreen, but most of the violence is not even this mildly graphic.
2. Profanity: "Shite" and "bitch" are each uttered once.
3. Sexuality: As far as PG-13 movies go, the sexual foreplay seen between Sara and Eric is rather tame, but there are two separate scenes where they interact in a sexual manner in varying states of undress.
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