Girl-power charmer: Rachel Zegler in ‘Snow White’.

Snow White ***1/2 (109 minutes) PG
Huzzah!

Disney’s sometimes questionable love of strip-mining its legacy by reprocessing classic animated films into live-action family features has, on this blessed occasion, come up trumps. Snow White is a hands-down winner.

As SW Rachel Zegler delivers a hearty performance blending just the right amount of warm, wistful flightiness with strength and fortitude. And as she showed us in West Side Story, she’s quite the songbird.

Zegler’s heroine plays opposite Gal Gadot’s imposing Evil Queen, who nails it as a vain, power-mad ice maiden whose soul is as cold as her taste in regal Goth-styled gowns and headpieces is hot.

The songs on the film’s setlist are invariably catchy and clever, propelling the story (as is the duty of any song in a musical), the story is briskly paced and the whole soiree looks superb, thanks to veteran cinematographer Mandy Walker who renders the appropriate atmospherics depending on whether we’re in the magical fortress or in the forbidding chambers the Queen’s gloomy palatial castle.

(Seems the rule Hollywood has observed for 50 years still holds true – if you want your big film to have a distinctive look, get an Australian DP.)

The terrific thing about Snow White 2.0 – based on the 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that created the animated film genre (is there anyone over the age of six who doesn’t know that?) – is that while they’ve updated the tale a bit to make our princess a more pro-active character, they haven’t really altered the essence all that much, with many images and themes echoing the original.

With her warrior-king father missing, presumed murdered, Snow White escapes into a magical forest after the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) lets her go, refusing to kill her as ordered by Gal.

In a quaint cottage that is carelessly left unlocked, SW gets some well-earned rest only to awaken to the legendary seven dwarfs who have just come back from mining a substance that looks suspiciously like the Unobtainium from Avatar. (Will anyone else pick this up?)

After some initial awkwardness – they think she’s an uncharacteristically attractive ogre – she befriends them, then befriends a group of forest-dwelling rebels, lead by Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) who she met in the EQ’s castle and who are fiercely loyal to their missing king (shades of Robin Hood and his merry men here.)

The Queen’s soldiery are on the hunt for SW, who, according to her talking mirror (very closely modelled on the original’s) is still more beautiful than she is.

But it’s not just being upstaged by a younger woman that motivates the Evil Queen need to eliminate Snow White.

Our girl also has a strong social justice streak and, having been raised with the idea that she must one day rule the kingdom with a kind heart and a good head for economics, she poses a power threat to EQ.

So a face-off is inevitable – and very well done. It’s a rousing moment that puts a very big cherry on top of this hugely enjoyable, top-quality confection.

As directed by Marc Webb (Gifted; the Garfield Spider-mans) there’s nothing clunky about all the girl-power elements, which are injected quite seamlessly and carefully into the traditional narrative.

Wisely, this version retains many of the key bits from the original, including the requirement that the dead Snow White can only be reanimated with a kiss from her One True Love.

See? Proactive feminist themes and good old-fashioned romantic ideals can harmoniously co-exist. Who’d a thunk it?

Oh, and thank you, Movie God, that this new Snow White preserves the potent knife image from the original, still among the scariest moments in animation history.

Here we see the point of the Huntsman’s blade right in Snow White’s face. Very threatening, very politically incorrect. So glad they kept it in.

Signs are that Snow White 2.0 is shaping up to be huge. It’s bright, breezy, often beautiful and uplifting with positive values and two leads that are so pleasantly photogenic. Kids will love it, as will their parents, guardians and assorted relatives.

The Snow White controversy – will the hot air survive opening weekend?

But hang on, hombre. What about all the dastardly negativity that has polluted Snow White’s pre-release? Won’t that hurt the film?

Here’s the skinny – nobody cares. Or, to be brutally specific, nobody who matters cares.

Apparently, this film is a reworking of a version that represented a more radical departure from the original Snow White film and story (by the Brothers Grimm).

A set photograph allegedly showed how the seven dwarfs of lore had been recast to show a more diverse range of characters. Having so many short-statured people was somehow deemed inappropriate, or stereotyped, or misrepresentative. Or something.

To be clear, the characters shown in this widely disseminated photo all appear in the film, but as the band of loyalist rebels not as replacements for the dwarfs.

On top of this, at the D23 Disney Expo Rachel Zegler made some light-hearted yet disparaging comments about the 1937 original.

She said it was outdated and too focused on SW being saved by a man, with Gal Gadot chiming in, too. This version would champion Snow White as a leader unencumbered by matters of the heart.

Those few seconds of poor judgement were seized upon by online pundits large and small as deeply reprehensible expressions of disrespect to the original, as well as showing what an ungrateful, arrogant brat Zegler was and how the film would be an emblem of Woke culture, the favourite chew toy of conservative right-wing commentators.

Thus began a relentless anti-Snow White campaign designed to disparage the film and poison its prospects at the box office.

It also cast Rachel Zegler as a sort of woke figurehead. Her off-the-cuff remarks were requoted and requoted to death, her “weird, weird” quip becoming a ubiquitous meme.

Even to those who agree that what she said was stupid and showed a grand lack of media nous the Rachel-bashing ritual became tiresome.

Then came the second wave of negative coverage feeding off the news that Disney was reshaping the film, ditching all the diversity vibes and adhering closer to the original.

This supposedly included the hasty insertion of the folkloric seven dwarfs, all digitally rendered and recreating famous images from the original film.

Zegler did not help matters much with comments about how much she should be paid once the film streams, nor with her stupid political remarks shortly before the election.

In an effort to make amends, she appeared with Little Mermaid star Halle Bailey now saying how great the original Snow White was. This just gave her haters more fodder to churn and re-churn in their YouTube videos.

So, will any of this matter?

All signs point to an emphatic NO.

Here’s why.

The kerfuffle only matters to commentators – mostly conservative – with an axe to grind against Disney for promoting woke ideas through its titles.

Many pundits blame this practice on the deterioration of the Star Wars brand and the theatrical failure of films such as Strange World, Elemental and Lightyear.

Yet the target demographic for Snow White – kids, mainly – don’t care about any of this. Or they wouldn’t if they knew about it. Same goes for those grown ups who take them to the film.

Inside the silos of online echo chambers the “Snow White is Woke Garbage” line might hold some currency, but beyond it that currency drops to zero.

Indeed, it might come as a shock to some conservative haters that Snow White actually promotes values that are – and this is not a joke – in accord with the re-ascent of Donald Trump; namely, the importance of faith, community solidarity, personal responsibility and the need to respect your military.

Very Trumpian. Again, this is not a joke.

Also, please clock this: we’ve just gone through an election cycle in the US that demonstrated quite definitively how the general public do not care what celebrities think or say.

Those few who do will regard Zegler’s comments as silly utterances that were mercilessly distorted and presented as a stab at traditional values. Really, all it showed was how Zegler needed better career advice. That’s all.

But these days, as we all painfully know, a few stupid words can be whipped up into a full-blown crisis that assumes the heft of Watergate and runs for two years.

The prediction is that none of this negativity is going to survive the first session of Snow White. It certainly won’t get through the opening weekend.

It’d be different if the film was a mess, if it was bad, if we could see the seams where it had been reworked and reshot.

But that just ain’t the case.

Footnote: Snow White features one golden double entendre that made your humble reviewer impulsively laugh out loud.

So loud, in fact, it carried clean across the packed cinema where a Disney officer, positioned at the opposite end of the venue, not only heard the laugh, but knew from whom it came.

How embarrassment. Still, blame Gal Gadot for being so beautiful. Somebody in the movie had to say something. What’s a guy supposed to do?