But things changed when the actress playing Snow White, Kristen Stewart, was caught in an affair with her married director. Chris Hemsworth manages to bring his character to life and there are some striking visuals, but that can’t make up for a dreary mess. And there is a girl, Sara (Jessica Chastain). That sends Freya into full-on Frozen mode and off she goes to set up her own ice castle and then conquer all of the surrounding lands.
Advertisement
HollywoodLifers, are you going to see The Huntsman: Winter’s War? The marketing team chose to sell this as a straightforward prequel to Snow White by focusing on the conflict between Ravenna and Freya, but that is not what this film is about. A crisis and a death send Ravenna’s sister Freya north. She’s played wonderfully by Emily Blunt. Why were so numerous huntsmen loyal to Freya? This prequel begins with her learning that her niece will grow up to be prettier than her! Yet we never really feel her influence resulting in an extremely low-stakes tale. With her sorrow manifesting as deadly jets of ice, Freya isolates herself in a wintry palace, raising an army of Huntsmen. It’s not exactly Disneyland over at her place.
Two of those huntsmen are Eric and Sara, the kingdom’s best warriors. They fall for each other, but Freya can’t abide that. The laziest move in the creativity department is Chastain’s lady warrior and Blunt’s snow sorcerer who are obviously cheap knock offs of Elsa from Frozen and Merida from courageous. Sure, Sara does kick some serious ass, and the two dwarves Nion (Frost) and Gryff (Brydon) do provide for some comic relief, but by and large, there is a sense of a lack of an emotional connection when it comes to the characters. If only they were more intelligible.
Help also arrives from an unexpected source – well, not really unexpected, but I’ll play along with the surprise.
Joshua Terry is a freelance writer and photojournalist who appears weekly on “The KJZZ Movie Show” and also teaches English composition for Salt Lake Community College.
It’s all too much without ever turning into much at all. The Huntsman: Winter’s War seems to be firmly rooted in the collective unconscious of all fantasy-adventure movies of the past, borrowing everything but offering nothing. He has trouble making the disjointed pieces of Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin’s script fit together neatly, though that would have been a tough job even for a seasoned veteran.
In the first film, the evil Ravenna (Charlize Theron) bewitched a king, killed him on their wedding night, and locked his daughter in a tower.
Advertisement
Is she the fairest of them all? It’s a movie in which, at the finale, the endlessly nonsensical narrator will sum up his word salad with “Some fairy tales do come true”, and we have no idea what the hell he could be referring to.
