Producers: Marc Platt and Jared LeBoff   Director: Marc Webb   Screenplay: Erin Cressida Wilson   Cast:  Rachel Zegler, Emilia Faucher, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap, Andrew Barth Feldman, Tituss Burgess, Martin Klebba, Jason Kravits, George Salazar, Jeremy Swift, Andy Grotelueschen, Ansu Kabia, Patrick Page, George Appleby, Colin Carmichael, Samuel Baxter, Jimmy Johnston, Dujonna Gift, Idriss Kargbo, Jaih Betote, Hadley Fraser, Lorena Andrea, Adrian Bower, Freya Mitchell and Zoë Athena   Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Grade: C

The Mouse House’s pillaging of its inventory of animated features for so-called live-action remakes finally reaches back to its earliest classic, 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” A few of these reworkings have turned out reasonably well, while others have been pretty bad.  “Disney’s Snow White” falls near the middle of the pack. In some ways it’s clearly superior—Rachel Zegler’s voice, for instance, is much more agreeable than the Betty Boopish quality Adriana Caselotti brought to the original.  (As to the controversy some have raised about her casting, get a life.  She’s lovely, and commits herself to the spirit of things nicely.)  But in most others it’s not.

The first thing to note is that the titular heroine is not your grandparents’ Snow White.  In 1937 she was portrayed as a helpless damsel-in-distress, who ultimately had to be saved from her villainous stepmother’s poisonous curse by the kiss of a handsome prince who’d been bedazzled by her beauty at first sight and had been searching for her ever since.  That old pattern is considered hopelessly passé at a time when women are more often than not depicted as strong and resolute, so it’s replaced by screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson with the new paradigm, in which the heroine is feisty and resourceful, the architect of her own victory.  As for the guy who was once her flawless savior, he now becomes a kind of goofy bumbler more likely to be in need of rescuing than to be her rescuer.

Thus we’re introduced to Snow in a new prologue, in which she’s the happy daughter (Emilia Faucher) of the good king and queen (Hadley Fraser and Lorena Andrea), who preside over a happy realm of plenty and shared prosperity.  They teach her the virtues of equality and service to others, and are pleased when she gives her crown of leaves to a lonely little girl (Freya Mitchell) at a festival, where she serves the cake she’d made herself.

All that changes when the queen dies and is replaced by the wicked stepmother (Gal Gadot) who bewitches the widowed king and apparently arranges for him to go off to a war in which he disappears.  Now empowered, she plunders the realm for her own pleasure, reduces Snow to the level of a scullery maid, and, when the Magic Mirror (Patrick Page) that has always told her she’s the fairest in the kingdom suddenly says the girl is prettier, orders the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to take Snow out into the forest and kill her.

Naturally he relents at the last moment and Snow runs off into the dark woods, where she’s led by a bevy of cute CGI woodland critters to a cluttered house, where she promptly falls asleep.  She’s awakened by its inhabitants, the seven dwarfs, who after tense introductions inform her that they’ve been mining diamonds there for nearly three centuries.  (What they do with them is never made clear.) 

It’s here that the drawbacks of this reimagined “Snow White” become glaringly evident.  First, the makers bring back two of the beloved songs from 1937—“Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work”—and while they’re loaded down with inane new lyrics and tons of slapstick, they’re like old friends you joyfully welcome back.  (“A Silly Symphony” returns later in much attenuated form, but the original’s other fondly remembered number, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” is simply jettisoned as incompatible with the revised plot.)

The problem is that their presence makes abundantly clear the mediocrity of the new numbers provided by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, from the opening ensemble “Good Things Grow” to Snow’s anthem “Waiting on a Wish,” which has the tuneless banality of all such “Frozen”-inspired stuff despite Zegler’s strong rendition of it.  (Gadot’s big number, “All Is Fair,” has the quality of a supposed showstopper that, had it been fashioned for a Broadway show, would have been bounced during the Boston tryout.) 

The second problem is that the dwarfs, CGI creations, are frankly a bit creepy.  The voices are fine—Andrew Barth Feldman (Dopey, who also narrates the long opening exposition), Tituss Burgess (Bashful), Martin Klebba (Grumpy), Jason Kravits (Sneezy), George Salazar (Happy), Jeremy Swift (Doc) and Andy Grotelueschen (Sleepy)—but the look in the live-action setting is borderline grotesque.  Given the elaborate slapstick skits the characters engage in, one can understand the decision to go digital, but competent actors of the right stature could certainly have been enlisted to do the job, and the effect, despite the efforts of a virtual army of VFX specialists, is not visually attractive.  Together with those animated animals, it only emphasizes that like all these modern Disney remakes, this is only nominally a live-action movie.

And what of the replacement for the Prince?  He’s Jonathan (Andrew Burnap, who looks a lot like KJ Apa), the leader of a ragtag group of bandits—Quigg (George Appleby), Farno (Colin Carmichael), Scythe (Samuel Baxter), Finch (Jimmy Johnston), Maple (Dujonna Gift), Bingley (Idriss Kargbo) and Norwich (Jaih Betote)—who may be a bunch of out-of-work actors but claim to be fighting the queen in the name of the absent king.  (Perhaps to make up for the CGI dwarfs, a word never used in the film, one of the seven, Johnston, is a little person, and, as it turns out, the most effective warrior of the lot.) 

Burnap makes Jonathan a likable fellow—and he shares with Zegler one of the best of the new songs, “Princess Problems”—but not a princely type.  Snow meets him in the prologue, when the queen’s guards capture him for stealing potatoes from the royal pantry and Snow must set him free.  He’ll be captured and imprisoned later a second time, and though he manages to free himself, he basically just watches as Snow confronts the queen and manages, through appeals to the kingdom’s innate goodness, to turn the populace against her.  (A particularly sappy touch has that lonely little girl from the prologue, now all grown up in the person of Zoë Athena, return the leafy crown to her).  Jonathan does take an arrow for Snow at one point (necessitating some surgical work from Doc, though the dwarf–obviously a learned fellow—wittily explains his name is but “a soubriquet”) and his kiss does free her from her slumber, but when they marry (presumably), she’s clearly the senior partner.

Gadot, on the other hand, works hard but doesn’t give the queen much more than conventional venom. It doesn’t help that she’s robbed of the big chase sequence that ended with her death in the original film; and though Wilson has invented a flashy alternative demise for her, one befitting her mirror-obsessed narcissism as well as her malevolence, it’s just not as effective.  Indeed, the 1937 movie is actually scarier than this one.

Nor does it benefit Gadot, or anyone else in the cast, that Webb stages the film more like a pageant than a movie, with many expository scenes curiously stilted and flat.  Perhaps that’s so we can take our time admiring the sumptuous production design (Kave Quinn) and costumes (Sandy Powell) and the lustrously colorful cinematography of Mandy Walker.   But it affects the editing by Mark Sanger and Sarah Broshar, which goes into hyperdrive during action moments but elsewhere often feels listless.  Jeff Morrow’s underscore makes its points without much subtlety.

“Disney’s Snow White” struggles to turn the admittedly dated 1937 film (no one is likely to miss the Prince’s song, for instance) into a modern parable of female empowerment (and, in a major subplot about Dopey, of overcoming shyness).  It’s far from the worst of these Disney redos, but nowhere near as much fun as its predecessor.            

Producers: David Brooks Paul Brooks, Hal Sadoff, Norman Golightly, Jeremy Plager, Stewart le Marechal, Al Morrow, Anna Mohr-Pietsch and Paul Parker  Director: Alex Parkinson   Screenplay: Mitchell LaFortune, Alex Parkinson and David Brooks   Cast: Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole, Cliff Curtis, Mark Bonner, Myanna Buring, Bobby Rainsbury, Josef Altin and Connor Reed   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

Alex Parkinson’s docudrama about an ill-fated saturation diving accident that occurred off the Scottish coast in 2012 follows on a 2019 documentary about the incident that he wrote and co-directed under the same title with Richard da Costa.  Some have compared “Last Breath” to Ron Howard’s 1995 “Apollo 13,” but it can also be set beside a more recent Howard effort, “Thirteen Lives” (2022), which recreated the 2018 rescue of a boys’ soccer team from a flooding cave in Thailand.  Unhappily it’s inferior to both.

What the film has going for it is Parkinson’s obvious desire for authenticity.  Grant Montgomery’s production design reproduces the settings with great care, and though the exterior shots of the “mother ship” from which the diving apparatus is launched have the look and feel of VFX creations, the interior is convincing, as is that of the small bell in which the three major characters descend to repair a pipeline on the seabed.  And Nick Remy Matthews’ cinematography is far from—if you’ll excuse the word—splashy, especially in terms of the murkiness of the barely-lit diving scenes.

The film’s flaws, on the other hand, are considerable.  It fails to fashion fully rounded characters, so that viewers are less invested in them than they should be—while making the mistake of casting in a major role a star whose shtick is so familiar his very presence undermines the credibility of the recreation.  And while it needs to be a nerve-wracking nail-biter, Parkinson’s sense of pace and Tania Goding’s editing often come across as dilatory, even torpid; the relentlessness the story demands seeps away, and the big moments fail to register as they should. 

Despite the presence of Woody Harrelson as Duncan Allcock, the veteran who leads the three-man crew that becomes the focus of the narrative (there are other contingents of three, but they’re little more than window dressing), the main character is actually Finn Cole (Chris Lemons), the young first-timer trained by Allcock whose fate becomes central when he’s separated from the “umbilical cord”—his oxygen source—during the dive and must rely on a backup system of very limited duration in his helmet.

But although the film begins with a prologue showing Cole and his fiancée Hanna (Bobby Rainsbury) saying their farewells before he leaves for the mission, he never emerges as a compelling figure, being more the stock newbie just as Allcock is the old guy who’s being reluctantly put out to pasture.  It doesn’t help that on the one hand Lemons, while pleasant enough, proves a pretty colorless actor, and Harrelson is just too much himself to disappear into his character.  Simu Liu is David Yuasa, the third member of the crew, presented initially as a man who submerges his emotions to concentrate single-mindedly on the job at hand but becomes more involved as his comrade’s life hangs in the balance.  Yuasa is physically convincing, and does a reasonably good job of delineating the character’s arc.  But he’s playing third fiddle here.

While the crisis of Cole, Allcock and Yuasa is playing out near the ocean floor, the one above it on the ship is given almost equal attention.  There Craig (Mark Bonnar), the mission supervisor, along with Captain Jenson (Cliff Curtis) and his first officer Hanna (Myanna Buring), struggle to restore power to the vessel’s malfunctioning DPS, an effort that requires desperate emergency intervention from the DPO (Josef Altin). 

Meanwhile Jenson and Hanna assume manual control over navigation to ensure that the ship is not buffeted away from the diving location, while Craig takes over from the nervous ROV operator (Connor Reed) to use the ship’s underwater robot to retrieve Lemons’ body.  Since he’d gone without oxygen for nearly half an hour, most assume that he couldn’t have survived. Of course, stories of this sort are unlikely to be turned into dramas if the ending is bleak, so you won’t be disappointed if you expect a miracle.  Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score, which has worked hard throughout, swells as powerfully as the storm-tossed waves to rouse our spirits accordingly.

Like the three actors playing the divers, those on the ship are entirely adequate—some, like Bonnar and Curtis more than that—but their characters aren’t much more than sketches, and the performers simply draw within the lines.

“Last Breath” ought to be riveting but instead is merely workmanlike, efficient rather than viscerally exciting.  And though he gives it his all, Harrelson’s presence seems to scream out that it’s just a movie. It might have been wiser for  Parkinson to have been content with his documentary.