Like I’ve been saying, I’ve been jonesing for the low-falutin 21st century studio fantasy movies lately. Disney has that new live action remake of SNOW WHITE that just came out, and that’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about, but it reminded me that I always kinda wanted to see HUNTSMAN: WINTER’S WAR, the 2016 sequel to the 2012 non-Disney SNOW WHITE & THE HUNTSMAN. What I remembered about that one is mainly that it was kinda boring but looked really great and that Charlize Theron (BATTLE IN SEATTLE) was fun as the evil queen. I don’t remember anyone liking it even as much as me, but it was a hit and they made a sequel that I also don’t remember anyone liking. But I’m here to report that it’s okay! I sorta enjoyed it.

It’s a little bit like a 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE approach of doing both a prequel and a sequel. It opens with a long prologue set “long before happily ever after,” according to the voice of Qui Gonn Jinn, who thoroughly narrates the movie from within the force. One historic moment we see is part 1’s wicked stepmother Queen Ravenna (Theron, YOUNG ADULT) poison her husband (Robert Portal, PAINTBALL MASSACRE), and honestly you gotta respect the showmanship of timing it so he dies right after queen takes king in their chess game. He could’ve died in the middle of the game, or she could’ve been stuck having to win with a knight or a rook, or lost altogether… there are just so many ways she could’ve blundered, but she took the risk and she executed it all flawlessly. Hats off.

Ravenna has a sister named Freya (Emily Blunt, SICARIO) who spends time with her, Ravenna now wearing her huge, pointy crown, and it made me wonder if you would really want to wear that fuckin thing when you’re just alone with your sister doing normal stuff. But then I figured yeah, the kind of person who would get one would definitely be the type of person who would insist on wearing it at all times. I bet she wears it in the shower.

I was thinking it was kind of corny that the evil queen would have a nice, normal sister, but I should’ve seen where this was going. Freya has gotten pregnant from her secret boyfriend Andrew (Colin Morgan, LEGEND), who’s engaged to someone else but says he’ll run off with her. Instead he murders their baby (sets it on fire? I was unclear) so she freaks out and turns him to ice, the grief and fury having unlocked magic powers different than, but related to, her sorceress sister’s.

Yeah, see, she becomes the Snow Queen. It’s a Brothers Grimm x Hans Christian Andersen collab. Or that seems to be the reference anyway, but it has almost nothing to do with that story, it just makes more sense for that to be the basis than for it to be Disney’s FROZEN, which was pretty recent at the time. She freezes some land in the north and becomes its ruler, and since she was unable to have the kid she wanted she decides to kill all the parents around, abduct their children by the wagonload and train them to fight as her “huntsmen.” The camera fixates on a few of them who will grow up into the main characters, and they did good job of giving us one (Conrad Khan) who we can tell is going to be Chris Hemsworth. I was waiting for them to do some kind of CONAN THE BARBARIAN wheel-of-torment-style aging gimmick, and sure enough the kid is practicing hacking a scarecrow with the Huntsman’s trademark, iconic, beloved hand axe, and suddenly it chops all the way through and the top half drops away and reveals Hemsworth (“TV Salesman,” INTERCEPTOR).

I didn’t remember this, but the Huntsman’s name is Eric. And we weren’t told this before, but he’s in love with Sara (Jessica Chastain, DARK PHOENIX), a badass huntswoman he grew up with, who does a type of Scottish accent and is very good at arrows but her hair isn’t curly so don’t worry, it has nothing to do with the Pixar movie BRAVE, which was pretty recent at the time. They have the freedom to sneak off and swim naked together, but when they decide they’re married and plan to run off Queen Freya finds out and they get jumped by the other Huntsmen for a pretty fun fight scene with various weapons (Sara is also good with the wooden staff). Stunt coordinator: Ben Cooke, MANDY, 1917, also stunt double for Jason Statham in THE MECHANIC, BLITZ, KILLER ELITE and SAFE.

Freya really doesn’t want anyone to experience love, so she makes a wall of ice between the two and Eric watches as fellow Huntsman Tull (Sope Dirisu, HIS HOUSE, THE GORGE) stabs Sara to death. Then they toss Eric into an icy cold river to be falsely presumed dead.

That’s when whatever happened in SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN happens. Loosely the story of Snow White, I guess, but I forgot Kristen Stewart’s Snow White was wearing armor and going to war like Joan of Arc? Anyway it skips to seven years later when Eric lives in sunny beautiful peace with a stone memorial to his lost love, but Snow White’s husband King William (Sam Claflin, THE NIGHTINGALE) comes and asks him to do a mission. Much like Ravenna asked him to find Snow White, Snow White wants him to find the Magic Mirror, because “there is an evil within the Mirror that has only grown in power,” so she had it sent off to storage, but the soldiers and the Mirror have gone missing, and they don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. As backup Eric gets Nion (Nick Frost, TOMB RAIDER), a tough guy dwarf from part 1, and his half brother Gryff (Rob Brydon, “Man in crowd,” FIRST KNIGHT).

They find the soldiers dead and determine that they killed each other. That Mirror knows how to fuck with people, you know? Then they get attacked by Freya’s huntsmen, but a mysterious hooded badass woman flips in and does a bunch of acrobatic super hero shit to rescue them. WHO COULD IT POSSIBLY BE? Oh my god you guys it turns out it’s Sara who is actually alive and she slaps Eric and is mean to him for a while because it takes them forever to figure out that Freya created an illusion to make Eric think Sara was dead and make Sara think Eric abandoned her.

Along the trail of the Mirror they get captured by lady dwarves Bronwyn (Sheridan Smith, TOWER BLOCK) and Doreena (Alexandra Roach, THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING), who bicker with Nion and Gryff and I would never dream of revealing whether or not they eventually fall in love. As we know from that new SNOW WHITE, ideas have changed about how to portray “dwarfs” on screen. Here it’s unclear whether they’re a magical creature like elves or just people with dwarfism, and I remember it already seemed very weird in the first movie to have non-dwarf actors playing their faces. But whatever the fuck they did here to make these larger sized actors have those proportions, it’s seamless, never even looks digital to me. The special effects supervisor is Dominic Tuohy (WANTED, EDGE OF TOMORROW, THE BATMAN) and the visual effects supervisor is Paul Lambert (BLADE RUNNER 2049).

Now might be a good time to mention that the director, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, was the visual effects supervisor of the first film. This was his directing debut, and I’m thankful, because he later directed an action movie I liked called KATE. They gave him a shot after Frank Darabont “left due to creative differences,” according to Variety at the time. The article said Nicolas-Troyan would use Darabont’s draft of the script, but the movie only credits earlier writers Evan Spiliotopoulos (BATTLE FOR TERRA, HERCULES, SNAKE EYES, THE POPE’S EXORCIST) and Craig Mazin (THE HANGOVER).

I think there’s a bit of a slow stretch in the middle here, but it picks up when they run into a CG creature who I thought at first was a minotaur (he has long, curved horns) but then he starts moving like an ape. Wikipedia says he’s a goblin. Eric uses a pretty great move to defeat him (running up a dirt wall, flipping over him and yanking his horns so they crack). As Eric and Sara dust themselves off they hear some noise in the distance and realize there’s a whole mob of these things swinging through the trees toward them.

The way they escape is kind of cool, but also kind of a classic “I can see what you were trying for there” storytelling moment. What they’re trying for is showing Eric’s heroism and self sacrifice to us and to Sara. He hurries the others over a rope bridge (possible reference to famous shot in Walt Disney’s SNOW WHITE) that goes over a small creek, and he purposely stays behind and chops the bridge down (like I mentioned, he’s an ax guy) so he can fight the goblins while the others get away. But Sara shows her colors by staying and firing flaming arrows at the goblins.

That’s all good, but you can’t help but wonder why he doesn’t just cross the bridge and chop it down behind him. Of course, the goblins could still follow, because just a minute ago they were swinging through the trees above, I doubt it would even occur to them to use the bridge, so why was he even messing with it in the first place? For me it detracted from the scene a little to be thinking about those things.

After some fairly routine adventuring there are some interesting turns in the plot, and it actually gets way better in the last stretch, which is somewhat unusual for this type of movie. Before I get to that, I want to mention a funny thing about this as a sequel or spin-off. I remembered that there was a scandal with part 1 director Rupert Sanders and star Kristen Stewart – Us Weekly published photos of them kissing, leading to a divorce, a break up with Robert Pattinson and lots of tabloid coverage. But the movie was a hit and both were at times reported to be involved with a sequel. When The Hollywood Reporter hollywood reported the focus shifting to the Huntsman they made it sound like the studio dumped Stewart, not the other way around, though they admitted “it is not clear why the decision to move forward without Stewart was made.”

Whatever they were trying to do, they made it seem like one of those sequels where they couldn’t get the star to come back and had to awkwardly work around it. This is Snow White’s kingdom, Eric is going on this mission for her, but we only hear her mentioned and in one scene see her from behind, screaming in anguish. It does sound convincingly like Stewart, at least, but it can’t help but remind me of BACK TO THE FUTURE 2’s fake Crispin Glover, or in THE BOURNE LEGACY when Jeremy Renner sees Jason Bourne’s name carved in his bunk bed. Snow White was here.

I was thinking about that and also realizing “Oh yeah, I guess Charlize can only really be in the prologue since she died in the first movie” when suddenly I was proven wrong. One of the twists (SPOILER) is that Ravenna’s spirit somehow survived inside the Mirror. So suddenly the mirror melts and morphs from a golden statue-like figure, and then the gold blows away like ashes, revealing Ravenna underneath, wearing a gold dress and with gold flakes above her eyes. The movie becomes way more fun when it’s the two sisters shooting gold and ice around and turning on each other because while Freya is the absolute worst, Ravenna is the absolute absolute worst. So there’s conflict.

I also forgot how cool the Mirror is. It’s not a normal mirror, it’s a large gold disc with a polished portion in the center. Also it T-1000s itself into this hooded figure (voice of Fred Tatasciore) with the reflective part in the middle of the hood, so when someone talks to him they see their own reflection as his face. In a flashback the Mirror tells Ravenna that Freya’s daughter (before Snow White) will become “the fairest of them all,” and Ravenna thinks it’s suggesting she kill the baby. “You cannot ask such a thing of me,” she says.

“I ask nothing,” the Mirror says. “I am but a reflection. And you… you have already decided.”

I love that. The Mirror telling her what to do is really just her vanity bringing out the worst in her. And setting aside any gender stereotypes they may fit into, these characters make alot of sense right now as a portrait of people who seek power. Freya does it specifically because a terrible thing was done to her so now she wants to make everyone else miserable too. Not a revenge on the person who did it to her, a revenge on the whole world. Hurt people hurt, they say, and sometimes it’s true, especially if they’re assholes.

The child soldier part has something interesting behind it too. Sometimes you want a cool action guy in a movie to have muscles like Hemsworth, but you don’t really think about the miserable life of lifting, starving and farting that character would have to live to maintain that build. Same thing here, we have the people of this universe who can throw weapons well, and it’s telling us yeah, you like that? All that it requires is hard work, discipline, your parents being murdered and suffering a lifetime of abuse.

We follow Eric and Sara from when they’re gangly kids who can barely lift their weapons to when they’re adults showing off their prowess. But when another batch of kidnapped children are brought in they don’t seem to have a problem with it. Eric is established as the nice one because he notices a little girl crying and helps her not be as afraid. But he’s still bringing her to learn how to kill for an evil queen.

Other than that trauma-based moral ambiguity they’re fairly generic heroes, made watchable by the charismatic movie stars playing them, but unable to find as much personality as their operatically evil opposition. Most people didn’t know that in between movies Hemsworth had expanded from “wow, I like this guy playing Thor” to actor-using-Marvel-clout-to-do-interesting-movies, because they slept on RUSH and misjudged BLACKHAT (and I never saw IN THE HEART OF THE SEA). I think he’s fine here but it’s not enough to escape the “maybe he doesn’t need his own action vehicles” cloud of the RED DAWN remake.

I love Chastain but I think her character here is pretty dumb, trying too hard to pander to an archetype they know people like me are suckers for. The way she moves, the way she spins and sheathes her blades, the way she brags “I never miss!” (even if it turns into an important plot point), it all feels more like “hey, this is the type of thing you guys like, right?” than an actual character. Chastain does what she can with it, but she deserves better.

So in that sense it feels a little by-the-numbers, but there’s plenty of style on the surface and at least trace elements of substance beneath, so it’s what I was looking for. Even leaving Snow White out of it for whatever reason is kind of cool because this way none of the heroes are royalty – they’re people who grew up forced to be soldiers or miners, now trying to use their skills for something good, ultimately hoping to leave this life and finally be free.

And by my estimation there’s enough cool shit to make up for the less exciting parts. As in the first one, the visual FX are very good. The ice is cool, the gold is better. There are occasional fairies or snakes and hedgehogs covered in plants populating the frame just as decoration. When Ravenna is hurt she coughs up black paint like the Penguin in BATMAN RETURNS, a proud tradition. Freya rides some kind of polar bear/wolf/leopard(?) hybrid and has a spy owl that I think is made of ice or very compact snow and makes kind of mechanical sounds, reminding me of Bubo from the original CLASH OF THE TITANS. To see through the owl’s eyes, Freya wears a feathery eyemask – it’s like magical VR goggles. I like that they take that kind of artistic license a few times, not sticking to the understood rules of what’s allowed in a fantasy/fairy tale. I’d prefer more of that, but at least I got a little fix.

This one lost money so the franchise was over and they all lived happily ever after, the end.