The Huntsman: Winter’s War a review/slating
Oh dear, this was a stinker.I was convinced it was going to be a prequel, and it starts off before the events of Snow White and the Huntsman, which I’d recently rewatched, of course, with Liam Neeson’s voiceover as he told us a story. Oh, Liam Neeson, you shouldn’t have bothered, no-one should.
In broad strokes, SWATH retooled the fairy tale as an action film, with Snow as a Joan of Arc figure and other well-known elements given a slight twist to fit into the overall framework. This feels like more of a traditional fairy tale, except it’s a sequel that’s lost the heart of the story (Snow) but tries to pretend it was a fingernail and it’s the rest of the body that we’re interested in. Don’t pay any attention to the stitching or the lumbering gait. If that’s an awkward metaphor, well, this mess deserves it.
It also feels like a mixture of LOTR (SWATH of course shared some similar bits, especially with The Hobbit and its dwarves), the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so it’s apt that Neeson lends his voice, Frozen gone wrong (Emily Blunt’s Queen Freya, who is also Jadis) and Brave (Jessica Chastain’s Sara who is also Edmund). Throw in child soldiers and some bits from the old film, like Nick Frost, the only original dwarf, the film is named after Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman, the fairies and nearly all the animals in Sanctuary - sob! - and the One Ring, sorry, the Horcrux, sorry the Mirror. So if nothing else, you can snark about the borrowings.
About the only original thing it does is show us she-dwarves: Sheridan Smith plays the feisty Mrs. Bromwyn and Alexandra Roach her nice but dim sidekick Alexandra Roach. Bromwyn has a hate at first sight relationship with fellow newcomer Gryff the dwarf (Rob Brydon, repeating his scene-stealing schtick from Cinderella). Now, the dwarves were the least problematic and most fun bit of this film for me, and I’d watch Smith and Brydon play Beatrice and Benedick IN A HEARTBEAT, but that’s about the last positive thing I’m going to write.
For all that the film tries to weave around SWATH, it doesn’t work. It avoids the whole Huntsman’s kiss reviving Snow, and indeed (because since when are Duke’s sons ‘Your Majesty’?) insinuates that William is Snow’s consort now. It also makes Snow, who VANQUISHED RAVENNA, susceptible to the evil of the mirror. Why? Well, apart from the offscreen reasons that meant Stewart was never coming back, the onscreen reasoning is that seven years after Eric saw his wife Sara die, she’s...not dead. Unfortunately, we only saw Eric and Sara fall in love as kids in fighting montages, get on kissing terms as adults and then be sundered in the prologue. So when Sara turns up to rescue Eric and the he-dwarves from some Dark Riders, er, other Huntsman, I’M NOT INVESTED. He has to win her back. I’M NOT INVESTED. With a capable fighter who has had to repress her feelings and believes herself betrayed, I should be all over her and the now roguish and less depressive, hopeless alcoholic Eric getting back together. But not so much.
And I hate to say this as someone who loves Chastain’s work and was delighted when I read she’d taken this part because Sara reminded her of Sorsha from Willow, but her Scottish accent veers towards Ireland at some points and has the unexpected effect of making Hemsworth’s Scottish accent sound closer to kosher. Well, it’s more consistent.
On the other side (because there’s this whole chess metaphor I wish they hadn’t bothered with), we have Freya, apparently Ravenna’s little sister (their creepy brother does not appear. Where was he? I thought he was always at Ravenna’s side as she killed her way through kings.) The Mirror is Ravenna’s power source - this doesn’t quite jibe with the spell Mommy Dearest put on her in SWATH, but it makes sense within this story, so I’ll let it slide. Freya hasn’t found hers until the man she loves kills their child because he ‘had to’ - he’s engaged to someone else. I will give them props for the reveal that Ravenna’s motive for doing so was that her mirror told her Freya’s baby was going to grow more beautiful than her, but from the second it happened IT WAS OBVIOUSLY RAVENNA. Little about Ravenna is subtle, which is almost a relief. But you’re side-eyeing Freya all the while for being so stupid.
ANYway, Freya, in her anguish, taps into her power source, which is ice/cold/frost/winter, trots off to take over some kingdoms up north, and despite being all magical, mainly does so by abducting children (to fill her empty crib), banning love in her court but demanding loyalty. Eric and Sara are the best at being Huntsmen. They fall in love. She fakes Sara’s death and Eric is chucked over a cliff, Sara believes him unfaithful and continues to be a soldier, the events of SWATH happen, Eric is quite chirpily talking to a cairn that represents Sara for some reason, when William turns up and says the mirror has been giving Snow some emotional grief - not for the first time, I thought the scene would have had more power if it had involved Snow herself instead of a glimpse of a dark-haired girl in thrall to the mirror, so they were going to take it to Sanctuary (terrible idea, I thought. It’s the heart of all magic, not the Room of Requirements) but it got nicked by tarry goblins.
Freya eventually gets her hands on it, reads the runes, which brings Ravenna back, sort of. There’s a bit of queenly tussling for power. Eric has a terrible plan. Illegal love conquers all and Freya finally catches up and realises that her sister killed her daughter (that’s the sister who killed kings and presumably sucked the life force out of her subjects) and stops being evil and starts being loving. As magic trumps fighters, she kind of had to to break the mirror.
Blunt did her best, but after waiting since The Jane Austen Book Club for her baddie, I was disappointed.
Er, the costumes are good. They play on silver and owls for Freya, and gold and ravens for Ravenna. The hair department went wild with the braids. It’s generally less literally dark than the first film, but for all its attempts to reassure us it’s set in the same world and sequel baiting in the epilogue, I am pretending this isn’t canon. The dwarves cannot make me recommend this or the fact that it sails past the Bechdel test. Also, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen quite a lot of the end of the film. But I started reading a review that claimed that the trailer was the film’s worst enemy. No, it was the concept and then the script.
This entry was originally posted at http://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/231589.html.
In broad strokes, SWATH retooled the fairy tale as an action film, with Snow as a Joan of Arc figure and other well-known elements given a slight twist to fit into the overall framework. This feels like more of a traditional fairy tale, except it’s a sequel that’s lost the heart of the story (Snow) but tries to pretend it was a fingernail and it’s the rest of the body that we’re interested in. Don’t pay any attention to the stitching or the lumbering gait. If that’s an awkward metaphor, well, this mess deserves it.
It also feels like a mixture of LOTR (SWATH of course shared some similar bits, especially with The Hobbit and its dwarves), the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so it’s apt that Neeson lends his voice, Frozen gone wrong (Emily Blunt’s Queen Freya, who is also Jadis) and Brave (Jessica Chastain’s Sara who is also Edmund). Throw in child soldiers and some bits from the old film, like Nick Frost, the only original dwarf, the film is named after Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman, the fairies and nearly all the animals in Sanctuary - sob! - and the One Ring, sorry, the Horcrux, sorry the Mirror. So if nothing else, you can snark about the borrowings.
About the only original thing it does is show us she-dwarves: Sheridan Smith plays the feisty Mrs. Bromwyn and Alexandra Roach her nice but dim sidekick Alexandra Roach. Bromwyn has a hate at first sight relationship with fellow newcomer Gryff the dwarf (Rob Brydon, repeating his scene-stealing schtick from Cinderella). Now, the dwarves were the least problematic and most fun bit of this film for me, and I’d watch Smith and Brydon play Beatrice and Benedick IN A HEARTBEAT, but that’s about the last positive thing I’m going to write.
For all that the film tries to weave around SWATH, it doesn’t work. It avoids the whole Huntsman’s kiss reviving Snow, and indeed (because since when are Duke’s sons ‘Your Majesty’?) insinuates that William is Snow’s consort now. It also makes Snow, who VANQUISHED RAVENNA, susceptible to the evil of the mirror. Why? Well, apart from the offscreen reasons that meant Stewart was never coming back, the onscreen reasoning is that seven years after Eric saw his wife Sara die, she’s...not dead. Unfortunately, we only saw Eric and Sara fall in love as kids in fighting montages, get on kissing terms as adults and then be sundered in the prologue. So when Sara turns up to rescue Eric and the he-dwarves from some Dark Riders, er, other Huntsman, I’M NOT INVESTED. He has to win her back. I’M NOT INVESTED. With a capable fighter who has had to repress her feelings and believes herself betrayed, I should be all over her and the now roguish and less depressive, hopeless alcoholic Eric getting back together. But not so much.
And I hate to say this as someone who loves Chastain’s work and was delighted when I read she’d taken this part because Sara reminded her of Sorsha from Willow, but her Scottish accent veers towards Ireland at some points and has the unexpected effect of making Hemsworth’s Scottish accent sound closer to kosher. Well, it’s more consistent.
On the other side (because there’s this whole chess metaphor I wish they hadn’t bothered with), we have Freya, apparently Ravenna’s little sister (their creepy brother does not appear. Where was he? I thought he was always at Ravenna’s side as she killed her way through kings.) The Mirror is Ravenna’s power source - this doesn’t quite jibe with the spell Mommy Dearest put on her in SWATH, but it makes sense within this story, so I’ll let it slide. Freya hasn’t found hers until the man she loves kills their child because he ‘had to’ - he’s engaged to someone else. I will give them props for the reveal that Ravenna’s motive for doing so was that her mirror told her Freya’s baby was going to grow more beautiful than her, but from the second it happened IT WAS OBVIOUSLY RAVENNA. Little about Ravenna is subtle, which is almost a relief. But you’re side-eyeing Freya all the while for being so stupid.
ANYway, Freya, in her anguish, taps into her power source, which is ice/cold/frost/winter, trots off to take over some kingdoms up north, and despite being all magical, mainly does so by abducting children (to fill her empty crib), banning love in her court but demanding loyalty. Eric and Sara are the best at being Huntsmen. They fall in love. She fakes Sara’s death and Eric is chucked over a cliff, Sara believes him unfaithful and continues to be a soldier, the events of SWATH happen, Eric is quite chirpily talking to a cairn that represents Sara for some reason, when William turns up and says the mirror has been giving Snow some emotional grief - not for the first time, I thought the scene would have had more power if it had involved Snow herself instead of a glimpse of a dark-haired girl in thrall to the mirror, so they were going to take it to Sanctuary (terrible idea, I thought. It’s the heart of all magic, not the Room of Requirements) but it got nicked by tarry goblins.
Freya eventually gets her hands on it, reads the runes, which brings Ravenna back, sort of. There’s a bit of queenly tussling for power. Eric has a terrible plan. Illegal love conquers all and Freya finally catches up and realises that her sister killed her daughter (that’s the sister who killed kings and presumably sucked the life force out of her subjects) and stops being evil and starts being loving. As magic trumps fighters, she kind of had to to break the mirror.
Blunt did her best, but after waiting since The Jane Austen Book Club for her baddie, I was disappointed.
Er, the costumes are good. They play on silver and owls for Freya, and gold and ravens for Ravenna. The hair department went wild with the braids. It’s generally less literally dark than the first film, but for all its attempts to reassure us it’s set in the same world and sequel baiting in the epilogue, I am pretending this isn’t canon. The dwarves cannot make me recommend this or the fact that it sails past the Bechdel test. Also, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen quite a lot of the end of the film. But I started reading a review that claimed that the trailer was the film’s worst enemy. No, it was the concept and then the script.
This entry was originally posted at http://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/231589.html.