--Ravenna, Snow White and the Huntsman
Snow White and the Huntsman is a much better movie than its impact on popular culture might suggest, closer to a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy than the version of the story more familiar to children. Thanks to a very particular aesthetic style that it thoroughly embraces and some very great cast members, including Charlize Theron and Ian McShane, this is at its best a great retelling of an iconic narrative. Only four minutes longer than the theatrical edition, the extended cut is not an enormously different movie as far as I am aware, but I have only seen the extended version. The central pillars of the film should clearly come across in both cuts, however. It is a well-constructed dark fantasy film and the rare kind of movie that does not shy away from sexism against both women and men. Queen Ravenna's deception, murder, and misandry are her reaction to misogyny, but no human protagonist ever says that either the worldview and behaviors hated by Ravenna or her own response is rational. Though the true nature of gender quality is an extremely crucial philosophical truth and one that is ripe for examination in storytelling, even now it is rather unusual for entertainment to directly address sexism against both genders.
Production Values
Snow White and the Huntsman has a fairly well-developed aesthetic style, especially with the things having to do with the sorceress Ravenna. Her phantom knights have a very distinctive look, and her magic mirror is shown within the first 15 minutes, portrayed in an unusual and unique way as some of the metal used in its surface detaches to form a figure that walks and speaks on its own. This is no mirror that only shows a figure in its glass, but a metal plate-like object that gives forth a pseudo-human shape. A troll that is encountered in the Dark Forest also has an appearance that certainly sets it apart from the more popular trolls of Lord of the Rings. Earlier, it is in this same Dark Forest that Snow White experiences hallucinations of the woods coming to life, the trees twisting into living things as plants produce blood and bugs swarm the ground. The costumes, sets, and creatures are certainly major strengths of this film. It is just the shaky, sometimes rapidly cut camera shots during some fight sequences that needed to be better.
As for the human characters, Kristen Stewart shows both aggression and vulnerability as Snow White, having moments where facial expressions and words convey her character's pain. Kristen Stewart receives lots of dismissal and mockery for a certain film series she was in long ago, and not everyone is incredibly outgoing or prone to blatant, persistent displays of emotion, not that Kristen Stewart never expresses emotion in any of her roles. When needed, she can be a fine actress! Chris Hemsworth actually does great as a tormented huntsman in the other titular role. His huntsman is a conflicted person desperate after losing his wife and yet not so selfish that he is willing to blindly turn over Snow White to the queen. Charlize Theron, not a title character and yet one of the core screen presences, uses her scenes to very clearly establish the simultaneous victimization and great hypocrisy and cruelty of hers. The dwarves show up around an hour in and feature immensely talented actors like Ian McShane and Ray Winstone, who of course make the most of their scenes.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A queen wishes for a daughter with pale skin, and her desire is granted when she has a daughter with this trait whom she names Snow White. A mysterious army appears after the queen dies when Snow White is a girl, and the king marries the only captive found, a woman named Ravenna. This now-queen quickly divulges that she equates patriarchal norms with men before killing her new husband with sorcery and having soldiers and civilians slaughtered by her brother and their shared army. As Ravenna uses her magic years later as a tyrant, she visibly ages, and the tradeoff between her sorcery and her appearance of youth (which she associates with beauty) worsens. She uses her powers to make young women look like they are old as she absorbs their youthful look she craves. When her mirror's humanoid form tells her that Snow White has grown more beautiful than her and that Snow White's heart can end her need to consume the energy of other people. Snow White escapes using a nail she finds lodged in the castle wall high above the ground, and the queen has her brother find someone who can pursue the princess. The person he selects for the task is a drunkard huntsman.
Intellectual Content
After being abducted as a child and enchanted to make her beauty bend to her magic power, Ravenna, is partially motivated to kill and abuse people by seeing how some men take advantage of patriarchal norms and partly by her own egoistic longing for power. More specifically, she observes early on that men are societally permitted to use women as playthings for their beauty and then discard them for younger women as they grow older. However, definite sexism against men lurks behind some of her first words in the movie, as she thinks men are the problem and not sexism against women, all while seeming to completely disregard the oppressive sexism against men that has marked numerous societies--which have trivialized or encouraged the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of men while denying it is harmful at all, pressured men into putting themselves in danger just because they are men, and supported all kinds of miscellaneous double standards about the sexual objectification or economic objectification of me. They have gone further to ignore male emotions other than anger, pride, and sexual feelings and to pretend like men do not want to be physically admired or emotionally loved. Misandry is no less irrationalistic, devastating, or popular than misogyny.
Ravenna's troubled backstory never stops her from touching a young man's face in a seemingly sexual way without his consent while he is a prisoner, while verbalizing assumptions about how he would have broken her heart if she would have fallen for his physical beauty. She is physically abusive to her brother, though she does suggest that she truly does love him in a very incomplete, selfish sort of way. She murders many young women to leech their signs of youth--I say signs rather than their youth itself because they would be the same age if they survive this sorcery, just with deteriorated bodies. A group of women whose husbands and brothers have been lost even scar their faces to avoid Ravenna's obsession with siphoning their beauty to preserve hers. Ravenna is, thanks to both the character herself and Charlize Theron's portrayal, a great villain and an example of how women are of course no different than men when it comes to their sins; it is only individuals, not men or women, who gravitate towards selfishness, cruelty, or irrationalism of any form, including physical abuse or sexual harassment. That it does not logically follow from being either a man or woman that one is strong, weak, righteous, rational, or wicked is controversial only because so many people have allowed themselves, by either personal assumptions or societal conditioning, to submit to erroneous ideas which are in fact logically impossible.
Conclusion
Disney will probably butcher their live action remake of Snow White like they did with The Lion King, but even if it ends up a pointless, pathetic remake, there will still be Snow White and the Huntsman to offer a more competent and original cinematic take on the story. The philosophical themes, the aesthetic, the performances, and the uniqueness work together to form a wonderful version of a story many people have heard. Its darker bent only sets it apart from the deluge of needlessly comedic films that came after 2014 and makes it more at home in a entertainment landscape that has produced fantasy like Game of Thrones. At heart, Snow White and the Huntsman is really about how sexism against both men and women has poisoned the world and how some people are willing to use whatever power they can claim to do absolutely anything as long as they get what they want. These are foundational truths explored in an excellent fantasy setting, and Kristen Stewart in no way ruins the movie despite her unjust reputation as a poor actress.
Content:
1. Violence: Ravenna uses a finger claw to pluck out and eat the organs of birds in full view of the camera, and there are multiple physical fights with bladed weapons. Blood is shown at times, but not gore.
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