What Charlize Theron does for Snow White and The Huntsman in her role as the Wicked Queen is a bit like what Godzilla does for a Godzilla movie: She gives you something big and distracting to look at while a lot of thinly defined victims run around frantically trying to avoid a grisly death at her hand.
This is the second Snow White movie in only two months, and where March’s Mirror Mirror was whimsical and playful like a cartoon fairy tale, this one is meant to be dark and scary like a real fairy tale. This is meant to be the Snow White with the scheming and the murdering of family members and the ripping out of hearts, not the Snow White with the “Hi-ho, hi-ho” theme song.
They’ve cast it with actors both well-regarded and popular: Aside from Theron as the Wicked Queen, Snow White herself is played by Kristen Stewart, an actress with considerable chops she’s rarely had good opportunities to demonstrate, since she’s spent so much of her career in the Twilight franchise. And the titular huntsman the queen sends to retrieve Snow White after she escapes from her tower is played by Chris Hemsworth, currently hammering things mightily as Thor in The Avengers.
The two are destined to get beyond the hunter and the hunted, though: Once they iron out their differences, they become allies in opposing the queen’s attempts to eat Snow White’s heart and become immortal. (You can see why S.W., in particular, would be against this.)
The first few minutes of the film, from first-time director Rupert Sanders, contain some lovely visuals, with intriguing uses of specific focus and a white-and-gray palette that promises something foreboding, something particularly spare and cold.