Characters from fairytales Snow White and The Snow Queen – which served as partial inspiration for Frozen – combine for a spin-off from 2012’s Snow White And The Huntsman.
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“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”. From a new storyline to magical effects to the cast’s chemistry, you need to know this story. Go Hero with a Thousand Faces. I also really liked the way they went with some of the creatures, they seemed odd at first but they were wonderful, sometimes frightening and each one was a force to be reckoned with. This allows one of the highlights from the first film Charlize Theron’s Evil Queen Ravenna to return into the fold and create new additions in the form of Emily Blunt as Ravenna’s Ice Queen sister Freya and red-haired lady archer Sara played by Jessica Chastain. Emily Blunt plays the sister of Ravenna (Freya), and even though I love Emily Blunt as an actress, she really slips in this performance. Sparks also fail to fly between Chastain and Hemsworth, the latter of whom makes for too generic a hero to really make his spin-off work, as everything interesting about him was resolved in the first film.
All in all, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is a movie that you’ll sit back and enjoy regardless of how you felt about the first movie. These two are both trained huntsman and the forbidden romance angers Freya to the point where she has them killed, which is how Eric ends up washing down a river and one day helping Snow White escape a similar fate.
But prior to its USA release, user ratings at IMDb have The Huntsman as a touch above its predecessor – though based on fewer reviews – with 6.3/10 from a little over 5,000 scores versus 6.1/10 from 220,000 ratings for Snow White.
Director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan also echoed Spiliotopoulis’ comments about the love shared by Eric and Sara.
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Beware what you ask the Magic Mirror, for you may not like its reply. Wasn’t there any other way to convey that the Mirror is evil? “And I said, oh, we’ll make sure that’s the case”. This resulted in the two getting fired, and the sequel to turn into a needless prequel. She fits the role of a warrior to the T. But it is Ravenna, in the limited time you see her on screen, that is the film’s real hero (well, despite being the ultimate villain of the story, of course). There’s a greater frisson between Eric and Bromwyn, Sheridan Smith’s spunky female dwarf. I didn’t feel anything for the whacko pairing of Hemsworth and Chastain, or for Rob Brydon and Nick Frost’s mugging as the dwarves, or Blunt’s icy depression, but found myself quite enamoured of miniature disappearing elves, sparkling columns of ice, the bear-tiger that Freya rides and the mirror taking a molten, familiar shape.
