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Given how they apparently changed the way "fairest" meant in this remake, I actually wonder if the relative looks here was the point. Of course, they couldn't hire someone outright ugly as the lead, but making sure that she's significantly and noticeably less attractive than the Evil Queen (very easy to do when you cast Gadot as her) could have been consciously intentional for the purpose of sending little girls the message that good looks are bad, actually. It's interesting, though, that the original film had a pretty overt message about the evilness of vanity, which gets lost when you replace the Evil Queen's obsession about being the fairest-as-in-beautiful to fairest-as-in-just. I don't know how the remake justifies it, but it seems bizarre that a Queen who intentionally sends her King off to die and oppresses her happy subjects would obsess over a magic mirror's judgment of her as being fair-as-in-just. Perhaps there's some way the Queen's perspective is presented in a way to show that she actually genuinely believes that she is a just ruler? Given how much Disney's been into redeeming female villains like Cruella DeVille or Maleficent, this could've been a good opportunity to show her as a misguided soul who was traumatized by a man in her past that led her to an obsession with being a just ruler that nonetheless turned into evil. I haven't heard that from any reviews, though.
It sounds like much of the film was written with conscious messaging in mind, based on the descriptions I read and saw of the plot, which seems to involve pretty unambiguous pro-Communist messaging, and also an addition of a plot point presenting Dopey as someone unfairly bullied for his muteness and who turns out to be able to talk in the end.
I think the message is that good looks are largely uncorrelated from good morals. Which is an overdone message, but probably a good one for the middling.
Heck, half the trad discourse on X is "stop chasing the thots just because they are the hottest chicks in your field of vision and instead seek out a woman of virtue (as defined thus)". Map it that way, and "who is the fairest of them all" could easily come out of the right, which bemoans a leftist culture of shallow beauty over virtue.
It's all so tiresome.
This interpretation makes no sense in the context of the story, though. The evil queen is the second-most “fair” person in the entire kingdom, but decides to murder her innocent stepdaughter out of jealousy, which is pretty obviously not morally virtuous.
You cannot become a morally virtuous person by murdering all the innocent children who are more virtuous than you, except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else, you are “most virtuous” by default (which isn't what happens in the story). However, you can become the most physically attractive woman by murdering all the women who are more attractive than you.
So the story only makes sense if (at least the evil stepmother) thinks of “fair” as meaning “physically attractive”, not “morally virtuous”.
That just means she needs to be more virtuous than the competition, so if she killed everyone except even worse mass murderers she might be the “fairest” somehow?
Maybe the qualifications for citizenship in this kingdom is to be a genocidal maniac?
Worst mass murderers range at about 100 victims, and "killing everyone except" would be certainly much larger than any mass murderer
(I'm sure we could stretch the definition of mass murderer to include Pol Pot et al. and bullshit in a country's worth of these by harvesting across different timelines or whatever convenient plot and physics contrivance is needed, but...)
That still could theoretically work. Say every single person granted access to the kingdom must have killed at least 2 people; if the Queen and Snow White were the only two humans who weren't killers, then the Queen could kill Snow White only and still have the lowest body count of the entire kingdom.
A solution looking for a problem! ... some of there "killed at least 2" could have killed in self-defense so this loophole should be closed, requiring resources to filter them.
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We're putting a lot of weight on the subjective judgements of a magic mirror. Maybe the mirror is as muddled as real people and lacks a satisfying resolution to a "fair" vs "fair" conflict.
Maybe the magic mirror was just gaslighting the queen about her daughter's bangability.
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Mirrors are shockingly uneducated in homophones.
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I certainly won't write apologia for the half consistent plot line.
I was only pointing out that a given message (whether consistent or otherwise in this particular film) can be right-coded or left-coded.
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The original of course didn’t shy away from beauty being good. But to your point vanity was bad. Yes Snow White was fair but also good hearted — she wasn’t consumed by her fairness. She inspired everyone around her to be a better person. She didn’t need to be a girlboss; the original Snow White was the paradigmatic young woman — fair, looking forward to building a family, kind, nurturing, and inspiring others to be better.
The modern iteration is…an activist
So fittingly enough, she was the paradigmatic young woman, in the context of the Modern Audience^(tm).
Yeah true. Problem for them is people just don’t like the paradigmatic young woman of the Modern Audience.
On multiple occasions I found myself wondering "who is this trying to appeal to?"
Outside of the bits with the AI-generated Dwarves it doesn't feel like a kids movie, at the same time it doesn't feel like a movie made for adults either. The whole thing has a very YA tumblr fandom "I'm thirteen and think this is deep" vibe to it.
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