The short answer is probably not. But I must note that at least we don’t have to endure another monotonous Kristen Stewart performance which would have just been too much for me to take and severely reduced my opinion of the film overall.
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“The prequel/sequel gives us the back-story of who the huntsman, Eric (Chris Hemsworth; Thor), is and how he became the dark, brooding, skilled warrior he is today”. A crisis and a death send Ravenna’s sister Freya north. She’s played wonderfully by Emily Blunt. Like the other soldiers in Freya’s huntsmen army, Sara was an orphan trained from childhood to serve the queen, though the film provides zero sense of what life was like growing up in a year-round winter boot camp. For one, the movie is titled Winter’s War, but truth be told, there is no real war in it. It also doesn’t have much of a plot, other than the huntsman and company (Jessica Chastain, Nick Frost, Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith and Alexandra Roach) trying to retrieve the missing “mirror, mirror, on the wall” before it falls into the wrong hands.
The film’s first act is almost insufferable, ploddingly paced and weighted by exposition shared via the buttery (if uncredited) voice of Liam Neeson. Even the supremely accomplished Chastain as Sara, in definitive make-up, medieval chic and stiffly Scots accent, fails to override the colourlessly deformed characterization she is lumped with. Blunt, a fine actress as she is, alternates between grieving eyes and cold stare, weighed down by overladen costumes that are, always, grey and metallic, often with strings of chains. Theron is as evil and nasty as she was in the first film and shows no sign of having any redeemable qualities.
“If you look at films like Elektra and Aeon Flux, the problem that studios have is that they try to make kickass women very sexualized”. It’s boring and unnecessary. Or did Nicolas-Troyan look at the script, think “Yeah, I think that Peter Jackson chap nailed it”, and call it a day? By the climax of the film, characters come out of nowhere, motivations are all jumbled, and sequels are set-up for no reason. Hard as the Huntsman has had it to this point, all the dankness surrounding him suddenly evaporates, as director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan very deliberately lightens the established franchise mood.
Also the visual effects are truly wonderful, particularly the shape-shifting liquid gold of the mirror.
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Which brings us back to the initial question of “why”. It’s not a bad spin on combining these stories in a slightly different way, but it’s just another in the recent trend of fairy tale – fantasy world popularity. The prequel part is interesting enough, but the ending is mildly ridiculous – not in a good way. “I genuinely was impressed by what she was doing”, says Hemsworth. But Trinity Chavez, who accompanied me to a screening, begs to differ. It’s not so great for the film, mind you, which is a bit like buying a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert and finding Taylor’s off on vacation, leaving her backing band to serenade the audience.
