Snow White and the Huntsman

A wicked Queen who loathes men kills her husband due to her blind fear that he will cast her off when her beauty fades and then takes psychotic steps to insure that it will remain forever.

But when his daughter whom she has kept prisoner comes of age and it becomes clear that she is even more beautiful, she immediately seeks to put her to death.

But Snow White (Kristen Stewart) escapes and her purity and innocence help her to make her way back to the forces who fought for her father and will still nobly battle for his seed.

A Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), seven dwarves, and many others assist her during her journey.

Her innocence would likely have not been so pure had she not spent her entire youth locked inside a cell.

Unfortunately, unlike the creators of Mirror Mirror, those responsible for Snow White and the Huntsman seem to have never escaped from the cell in which they were nurtured, and are still struggling to develop genuine tension, emotion, and plot.

At no point throughout this film does it seem probable that Snow will not succeed. Her young curious yet cautious inner light intuitively and instructively guides her steady improvised actions.

As if she was born to lead.

But the film sets up another tired opposition between naturalistic and fabricated extremes with the King's only heir exuding divine rights with every instinctive calibration.

Snow's rallying cry when she's reunited with the resistance lacks depth, character and ferocity.

I really wanted to like Muir's (Bob Hoskins) omniscient observations but they were just too much.

The Huntsman predictably abandons Snow but only for two to three minutes.

And William (Sam Claflin) doesn't hide his feelings at all upon being reuniting with her, going so far as to actually display them.

It just doesn't make sense.

The Huntsman and William do form a pseudo-Jacob/Edward dichotomy for Kristen Stewart which brings in a little Twilight.

But this really only makes things worse, although in the end it seems that she desires Jacob, which is, of course, the correct preference.

However forbidden.

Mirror Mirror

Possessing a self-aware mischievous aloofly focused reflexivity which takes interpretive postures narratively to heart, Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror playfully reimagines Snow White and infuses it with lighthearted billowing charm. The Queen (Julia Roberts) is certainly wicked, the princess (Lily Collins), beautiful. Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer) bumbles along unwittingly thrust between the two and the seven dwarves provide voyeuristic commentary and transformative benignity which constructively pluralizes the action by creating an audience within an audience.

It's totally web 2.0.

Economic matters haunt the film as the Queen brutally taxes her subjects to pay for her ostentatious whims. The dwarves have taken to robbing those who pass through their section of the forest due to the fact that they were expelled from the village because the Queen found them ugly. The villagers didn't stand up for the dwarves which has lead to resentment. When they rob a royal coach carrying funds obtained through taxation they therefore have no desire to return them. But Snow White sees things differently and returns the levies and gives the dwarves the credit.

Thus we have a situation where a capricious exception was made which divided the struggling populace. Feeling helpless and seeing no way of securing a lasting productive solution on their own, this exception lapsed into criminal activity. Then, after taking into their care a royal outcast, a solution presents itself necessitated by the underhanded activities they were forced to engage in.

Unfortunately, this solution was brokered by the outcasted royal rather than the people themselves. Had they remained united, perhaps they could have taken steps to frustrate the villainous Queen and would not have had to rely upon accidental august interventions.