'Snow White and the Huntsman' - Our Review

Everyone knows the story; The evil stepmother, the seven dwarves, a poison apple and a handsome prince. However in this fairytale retelling, Kristen Stewart steps into the role as a slightly more kick-ass Snow White.

Strongly influenced by feminist thinking, this tale of a brave, beautiful and far from helpless Snow White is not your typical "Damsel in Distress" story. This Snow White doesn’t depend on men for help in being saved from the evil Queen, rather she is more than capable of fending for herself – with only a little help from The Huntsman. 

Though the film itself is knowingly predicable, first-time director Rupert Sanders brings a unique spin on the beloved fairytale by creating what feels like a cross between the 2000 fairytale/fantasy TV series The 10th Kingdom and an epic battle movie; 

Snow White's happy childhood is cut short when her new stepmother (Charlize Theron) murders her father and imprisons her for almost a decade. The evil Queen, along with her creepily close brother, then take over the Kingdom - quite literally feeding from the beauty of young women in order to remain fairest in the land.

Once the Queen’s faithful mirror delivers the news that Snow White, if kept alive, will soon become fairer then her, she quickly sends her brother to fetch the princess so they can dispose of her accordingly. Unfortunately for them, Snow White escapes and runs into The Dark Forrest, leading the Queen to trick a local huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) into finding her and only bringing back her heart.

 

Tricking the Huntsman backfires, though, and he swiftly decides to help Snow White in her plan to take down the Queen and rightfully reclaim her Kingdom. They are joined by Prince William soon after - who not only is in love with Snow White but saves her life when the Huntsman is not around - as well as eight dwarves. With the group larger and stronger then ever before, they finally go in to battle."

Charlize Theron is simply amazing as Ravenna, delivering a flawless performance as the furious and psychologically unstable Queen. You are able to feel both fear and sorrow for her character thanks to the little bit of subtle depth she portrays in her. All in all, she is the perfect villain.

Kristen takes to her role wonderfully with her simple yet stunning beauty creating a perfect Snow White. Her shy personality in reality is channelled into her performance and she portrays her character’s kindness and strength flawlessly, reminding us that her ability to adapt to different roles never fails to impress.

Sam Clafin plays Snow White's childhood-best-friend, Prince William, who obviously still has feelings for her after all the years she spent imprisoned - even though he had thought her dead the entire time.
Sam does a wonderful job portraying both the fear and elation his character feels as he reunites with Snow White for the final battle.  

  

 Chris Hemsworth is the perfect picture of a tough, strong huntsman, balancing both masculinity and compassion equally throughout the film. He shows his strength as an actor in some of the more quieter moments - such as speaking about his deceased wife or teaching Snow White how to fight so she can survive - but he is also well able to become somewhat of a comic relief in his scenes with the dwarves.

Some people will be shocked to see the 'little' dwarves portrayed by 'big' actors such as Nick Frost and Brian Gleeson. While the actor's bodies were all reduced in size with thanks to the film's seamless CGI, their performances were nothing 'short' (see what I did there?! ;)) of amazing.

For this film it really seems that no expense was spared in the graphics department and it definitely pays off. The special effects throughout the film were phenomenal - from the way characters could explode into flocks of crows or shards of coal, the hallucinogenic "Dark Forrest" scenes where mounds of grass and muck could suddenly turn into trolls, and the enchanted wood full of whimsical creatures such as faeries, sprites, and even a deer that explodes into a flock of butterflies - you feel drawn in to the story and may, at times, feel like you are actually there experiencing all that the characters are.

This imagery is surely helped along by the impressive score, done by James Newton Howard, which only serves to enhance these visuals and help in creating such a strong atmosphere.

Overall, we felt that it deserved 4/5 stars, and while we must admit that we could have initially taken or left the film due to its well-known story-line, Rupert Sanders has impressed us with a somewhat unique approach to the beloved fairytale.

This is certainly Kristen Stewart's best performance to date, one in which we can definitely get lost in and forget about comparing her to any other characters she has played before - the mark of a truly good actress. 

KStew fans, like us, definitely won’t be disappointed with this well made fantasy film which is an undoubtedly impressive attempt at Sander’s first blockbuster.

We cannot WAIT to see it in the cinemas again, and then buy it on DVD :)

Let us know your thought on the film (and our review!) in the comments below!

Written by myself (Twilsessed) and my friend, Caitríona, who got to attend the premiere on May 23rd, with thanks to Universal Pictures Ireland.

The Irish Times: Interview with Kristen Stewart + SWATH review!

JUST DON’T SAY anything bad about Kristen Stewart. Seriously. The first time I met Ms Stewart she was 17 years old. She had just finished shooting Twilight and was intimidated, even before the film’s release, by the burgeoning popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga.

“I’m, like, Little Miss Indie film,” she told me. “I really wanted to work with Catherine Hardwicke, the director. And I presumed Twilight was just another off-centre, cool little film for a very devoted, quite exclusive fan base.”

The Twi-hard fanbase soon set her straight, but she was taking it well: “Girls, especially at a certain age, can be bullies. But I understand why. I understand their covetousness. Edward is such an icon. All I can say is ‘sorry’ to anyone who thinks I’m not Bella Swan. Really. I’m sorry for stealing Edward. I completely relate to that. But I love the book just as much as they do and share their protective urges toward it.”

Back then, she was not yet a star, but she was already an accomplished actor. She had impressed critics with what ought to have been a mere wisp of a part in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and had stolen scenes from right under Jodie Foster’s nose in David Fincher’s The Panic Room.

Wearing jeans and a hoodie, she curled up into a little ball beside me, tucking her Converse sneakers under herself. She was whip smart, singular and terrifically, endearingly awkward. I developed a weird maternal, or possibly materteral instinct for the teenager right then and there.

It is a relief to sit down with her in London all these years later and to discover that she hasn’t changed a bit. She retains all the wobbliness of a newborn foal. She trips over her own shoes and words.

“Um, um . . . blah. Okay. Let’s just start again,” she stammers, mid-introductory handshake. “Cheers. Hello. All that.”

It’s a vindication of sorts: for the longest time I’ve enjoyed physically poking people who talk trash about the 22-year-old and her Twilight franchise, especially when these same arbiters go on to praise the far more conservative Harry Potter sequence.

“Oh wait . . .” She panics momentarily. “I mean, I don’t mean wait, I mean sorry. I don’t want to stop talking but you know there’s no film in that camera over there?”

That’s okay: this isn’t for TV.

“Oh. Okay. Cool. I just thought I had wasted your time. Okay. We can talk now. Sorry.”

You’d think K-Stew would be a little bit grander at this point in her career. You’d think she’d be accustomed to the glare of the spotlight. As one half of bicephalic celebrity juggernaut “Robsten”, she and her romantic partner, Robert Pattinson, are among the most photographed and stalked entities on earth. Instead she sits, feet all fidgety, with her shoulders rigid against her ears. It’s only when we start talking in wolf-dog noises – she lives with two of the beasts; I have one – that she loses her angular shape and nervous twitches.

Do hers try to talk too, I wonder. Like they’re trying to make human sounds?

“Yes. Oh yes. All the time!” she cries, over random, unco-ordinated hand gestures. “They definitely talk. ‘Arr Arr Arr!’ They think they can imitate me perfectly.”

An assistant briefly puts her head around the door as Kristen makes like a lupine. She doesn’t look remotely surprised.

“I have no tact,” laughs Stewart. “That’s the thing. None.”

She really isn’t terribly Hollywood. You can see why she loved shooting in Montreal recently, a place where nobody cared if she talked in wolf-dog and nobody cared what was in her bins.

“I’m usually pretty self-conscious about running around town with my face hanging out,” she says. “I got to live more in four weeks up there than I would in a lifetime worth of my normal life.”

It’s a big year for Kristen Stewart in her “normal life”. Walter Salles’s adaptation of On The Road sees Hollywood’s shyest starlet cavorting in a three-way on-screen relationship with Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund. In November, the Twilight franchise takes a final bow with Breaking Dawn Part II.

This week, Snow White and the Huntsman will put Stewart’s box-office clout to the test. It’s an epic fantasy film that sees Kristen’s Snow White face down Charlize Theron’s wicked stepmother on the battlefield. Even she’s a little surprised to find herself in a second big-budget fantasy franchise.

“I know what people must be thinking,” she says, breaking into So-Cal business speak: “‘Ooh. Is she trying to prove herself outside the Twilight franchise? Can she hold up another one?’ That’s so not why I did this. That’s so not why I choose things.”

So why did Little Miss Indie plump for this year’s Narnia Chronicles? A rollicking reimagining of the Grimm Brothers’ classic that falls somewhere between Lord of the Rings and Princess Mononoke, Rupert Sanders’s impressive debut feature sees Stewart channelling the qualities of a feral child and never, ever whistling while she works.

“It felt like new material to me,” she tells me. “I had definitely seen the Disney cartoon. But even that’s a tenuous connection. I think I watched it once or twice. It wasn’t one of my favourites. So this wasn’t about rediscovering something I connected with before or as a little girl. It moved me right now. It was completely novel. She’s the most frazzled, raw character I’ve ever played. Her nerves are so very close to the surface of her skin.”

A natural actor in the way that certain footballers are natural strikers, Stewart offers a kitchen-sink-friendly nous that is nicely complemented by Sanders’s very tactile, very maggoty universe. That, she says, was ultimately why she was happy to sign up for a fairytale.

“I mean, it’s a princess story,” she laughs. “It’s supposed to be la-la-la. But none of us ever felt silly. We never had to fake a thing. We were consistently challenged by our environment. Rupert threw very dangerous elements at us all the time. It was muddy. It was cold. It was England. You can read through something. You can get into character. But if you want to get that little bit deeper nothing hurts like actual pain. I love that. I love watching people in discomfort on-screen. And you can always tell.”

Stewart never varies her methodology, whether she’s playing Bella in Twilight or Marylou in On the Road. She says the Kerouac book changed her life as a younger teen. But that doesn’t mean she regarded the Salles adaptation as being any weightier than her other roles.

“I don’t like it when people dismiss Twilight as puppy love or Snow White as a fairytale,” she says. “Why should something be a less valuable depiction of the human condition because it’s about a 17-year-old girl? Why should something be less credible as a story because it’s about a princess? I don’t think of those parts as lesser parts.”

It’s hard to know what Stewart’s Twi-hard fanbase will make of On the Road. Walter Salles’s film, though far from being an unqualified success, pokes away at the misogyny of the original Kerouac text. The book’s Beat heroes, in particular Dean Moriarty (a thinly fictionalised Neal Cassidy) are exposed (and almost denounced) as lousy boyfriends, husbands and fathers.

Consequently, at last week’s Cannes premiere, audiences were taken aback to realise that Stewart – playing Dean’s passed-around, 16-year-old bride – is naked and cavorting for a good deal of the 137-minute run-time.

“I never thought of it that way,” she says. “I felt safe with Walter. I felt safe with the guys. It wasn’t about me being naked. I loved the challenge of it. I look at it now and it’s insane. But I don’t feel connected to what’s on the screen. I mean, I do but . . . it’s me, but it’s not. And I love Marylou. She jumps right off the page and smashes you in the face. With her tongue. She never sold herself. That was the one thing about her that made her different from everyone else in that movement. She wasn’t rebelling against anything. She was just being.”

Two weeks after I meet Kristen Stewart in London she walks past the press room in Cannes. Her On the Road co-star, Kirsten Dunst, steps in to help when Kristen, in heels she just can’t manage, almost trips over her own feet.

It really is a relief to discover that she hasn’t changed a bit.

Irish Times

 The Irish Times also reviewed Snow White and gave it 3/5 stars! See it below:

YES, YES, YES. The latest adaptation of Snow White – like this year’s feeble Mirror Mirror – is, of course, an outrageous rip-off of Tim Burton’s puzzlingly successful Alice in Wonderland.

As in that film, the heroes get to don armour and wallop antagonists on their hairy heads. Come to think of it, Burton’s film owed an awful lot to Lord of the Rings. The new film is positively dripping in other people’s DNA.

Never mind. Snow White and the Huntsman turns out to be a surprisingly nifty piece of work. Whereas Alice in Wonderland toyed too much with whimsy and cuteness, Rupert Sanders’s grimy epic allows in a surprising amount of blood and gratifying degrees of entry-level horror. It’s spooky, funny and just a little bit freaky.

Charlize Theron is impressively spiteful as the wicked queen who takes expected umbrage at the mirror’s outrageous suggestion that her stepdaughter might be the “fairest of them all”. The under-rated Kristen Stewart brings introverted fury to the role of Snow White. Though the film stays away from clever-clever pop-cultural references, one still gets the sense of a lady who lunches becoming confused by a looser, more contemporary class of beauty.

Chris Helmsworth, our current Thor, confirms his status as the era’s most gifted wielder of the manly grunt. Playing the titular huntsman, he is offered every opportunity to pluck the damsel – no slouch at defending herself, mind – from the clutches of demonic henchmen.

At times, the smoky art design becomes just a little monotonous. But the interlude in a fairy glade offers some colourful relief, and the contributions from the celebrity dwarfs – Ray Winstone, Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Nick Frost and three others – are consistently amusing.

Mind you, one can’t help but worry about the notion of digitally altering fully sized actors to play little people. Isn’t this a little like blacking up performers to become ersatz people of colour? Some class of boycott is sure to follow

Irish Times

Not 1... not 2... but 9 new Cosmopolis Clips!

For those of you who do not like spoilers... leave now.

For those who just cannot wait to see this film... press play on all the videos below - and enjoy ;)

no Rob in these last three, but they still look amazing!

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Kellan Lutz in Time Warner Cable Twilight Inspired Commercial

Time Warner Cable have released a really funny Twilight-Themed Commercial in the US, which features the lovely Kellan Lutz! Have a look at it below : )

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New Cosmopolis Clip!

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