YMMV / Snow White & the Huntsman

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Ravenna spares Snow White and simply locks her in a tower for years. When we see the girl grown up, she appears to have at least been regularly fed and treated decently. So that begs the question of whether Ravenna genuinely felt affection for the girl. She only moves to kill the princess when she learns that it'll grant her eternal youth and beauty. Is this twisted affection on Ravenna's part, or is it an effect of Snow's fairest blood?
• Broken Base: Kristen Stewart's performance. Some find her to be just as dull and wooden as she is in the Twilight films. Others think it's the the exact opposite.
• Common Knowledge: This is the movie that tries to claim Kristen Stewart is more beautiful than Charlize Theron? What is actually stated in the movie is that Snow White is "of fairest blood", and that Ravenna's mother was too, meaning it has nothing to do with physical beauty, and is entirely based around inner beauty. The effect Snow White has on the others around her is felt even by a blind dwarf, making it clear to be nothing to do with physical looks.
• Cry for the Devil: Ravenna, who was taken from her mother by her homeland's king.
• Evil Is Cool: Ravenna is also a huge badass, who's nearly invincible and doesn't seem to even need the massive army she commands. One of Ravenna's coolest moments is when she stands in the middle of a fire just to deliver a Badass Boast.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Most fans preferred the Snow White/Huntsman pairing as opposed to Snow White/William, especially since it's the Huntsman's True Love Kiss that wakes her.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Ravenna as William kisses Snow White. Snow White initiates it, but Ravenna!William tries to go back in for another kiss, but seems to catch him/herself.
• Girl-Show Ghetto: Zigzagged. Snow White is the lead but she's barely featured on some of the posters, the marketing choosing to focus on Chris Hemsworth as the Huntsman. However given the title has 'Snow White' in it, that was a pretty clear indicator that she was the lead. The film did make plenty of money at the box office, and combined with the success of The Hunger Games, it was made clear that Hollywood was strongly considering greenlighting female-driven action movies. Notably the sequel, which put emphasis on The Huntsman rather than Snow White, wasn't nearly as successful.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Now that it's public knowledge that Kristen Stewart (playing the title role) and Rupert Sanders (director) had an affair, it makes the movie either more watchable or cringeworthy depending on your tastes. Not to mention the fact that one of the fairytale's themes is that of an older woman being supplanted by a younger beauty. Now consider the fact that Snow White's mother was played by the director's real-life wife...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Sam Claflin plays an expert archer who gets his way onto Finn's team by shooting his current archer. The next team he joins certainly doesn't need another bowman.
  • Chris Hemsworth wielding an axe.
  • Ravenna draining out her milk bath to feed the peasants, after Belle Delphine proved there was a market for it.
  • William kisses Snow White and is shortly revealed to be Ravenna in disguise. Just a couple of years later, Kristen Stewart came out as bisexual, and Charlize Theron would play a bisexual woman in Atomic Blonde.
  • Charlize Theron is doing the opposite to her role as Ravenna in Mad Max: Fury Road, where she plays a vigilante rescuing girls from a tyrant.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The majority of the audience were either just there for Thor with a vaguely Scottish accent, or for Charlize Theron Chewing the Scenery every chance she got. Although given that the sequel featured both them and not Kristen Stewart, its domestic failure suggests that quite a lot of people were tuning in for her.
• Moe: Lily, the girl from the village of scarred women, is oblivious to all the horror around her and has a very cute scene where she and Snow White make a doll together.
• Moral Event Horizon: The wicked queen and her brother crossed it long ago, as Snow White's kingdom isn't the first they took over using the same Honey Trap ploy.
• Narm:
  • At one point, a troll attacks Snow and her escort. How does she deal with this? After she screams at it, she just stares at it until it decides to go away.
  • Many found the repeated insistence of Snow Why being the Fairest of Them All to be this, due to its status of an Informed Attribute.
  • Finn's bad and quite goofy haircut can deter him from being seen as a formidable foe to the audience.
  • Snow White's Rousing Speech is either this or Narm Charm.
• Narm Charm: Charlize Theron's incredibly hammy performance as the queen is equal parts hilarious and terrifying. It's clear she's having an absolute ball.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Early on, one of the resistance fighters and his son are captured and brought before the Queen. The father stays silent and ignores the Queen's taunting, but the son grabs a dagger and stabs her in the stomach. Granted, it doesn't kill her but you have to admire his spirit.
  • Greta only appears in a couple of scenes towards the beginning, but is a rather heartwarming Morality Pet for Snow White, and mercifully is seen restored to her youth at the end.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The stigma of Kristen Stewart's fling/affair with the (married) director will likely follow this movie forever now. It even perpetuated rumors that she was dropped from the franchise because of it.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Many had trouble getting past the conceit that Kristen Stewart is "fairer" than Charlize Theron. The movie does stress that it's Snow White's inner beauty, but many found that to be an Informed Attribute as well.
  • The dwarfs were all played by actors of average height, with special effects making them appear smaller. This earned the film a protest from the Little People of America, and a condemnation from Warwick Davis.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Sam Claflin would hit it big the next year with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and be better known for Me Before You, Peaky Blinders and Enola Holmes.
  • Greta's actress Lily Cole who would become better known for her business 'Impossible' and environmental activism.
• So Okay, It's Average: The critical reviews appear to be leaning between enthusiastic raving and the exact opposite. The fan reaction, meanwhile, has been more in the middle; many viewers thinks it's a visual feast for the eyes and has some interesting ideas, but the execution is uneven.
• Squick:
  • Good Lord, Ravenna is doing this almost the entire movie. Ravenna's implied incestuous relationship with her brother, the Queen's creepy relationship with Snow White, her used milk bath being piped to peasants outside to collect and drink, the scene where she eats the raw hearts of dead birds, the scene after she poisons Snow White and all her disgusting dead crows slowly ooze together to form her body. By far, the creepiest moment has to be when she tricks Snow White into eating a poisoned apple by pretending to be William and allowing Snow White to kiss her. It's downright gross.
  • You might not want to watch the deleted scene if you want to keep drinking milk without thinking twice; Ravenna is apparently having an orgasm in her milk bath, and people drink that stuff. Try un-seeing that.
  • The apple that Ravenna in the guise of William tricks Snow White into eating. After she takes a bite it turns black and moldy and grows hair.
• Stoic Woobie: Considering Snow White loses her mother as a child, witnesses her father being murdered by her stepmother and gets locked in a tower for years, it's surprising how stoic she is. Her first thought is to comfort the scared Greta when she's brought to the cell.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Even viewers who otherwise enjoyed the film have been known to state they would’ve preferred the original script's portrayal of Snow White and Eric's relationship as being a father-daughter bond rather than the half-baked romance in the finished film. The huntsman becoming Snow White's mentor and protector after she lost her father at a young age could've been quite heartwarming and the concept of Snow White being woken by familial love rather than romantic love was quite unique in 2012 (Frozen and Maleficent subsequently went in this direction a few years afterwards and were praised for it). Within the movie itself, Eric seemingly having romantic feelings for Snow White adds little to the plot besides creating a superfluous love triangle with her other love interest William, that isn't even resolved onscreen; if you've seen the sequel it ends up feeling even more pointless given it reveals Snow White married William and Eric gets back with his Not Quite Dead Lost Lenore.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Special mention goes to the dark forest, the glass soldiers, and the dwarves.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The film may seem like another adaption of a Disney fairy tale by Tim Burton, who also made the live-action remake of Alice in Wonderland (2010), but first of all, this movie was not made by Disney, and second, it's PG-13, due to some moderately graphic violence (such as Ravenna eating birds' hearts). There's also some mild Incest Subtext that could make parents (or really anyone) squirm.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • Finn's weird bowl cut looks ridiculous, to the point that some viewers have difficulty finding him intimidating at all because of his hair. It wasn't a wig, either, and Sam Spruell didn't much care for the look.
  • Snow White is inexplicably wearing pants under her dress, facilitating an Action Dress Rip, even though she has been locked in a tower for most of her life and would have no reason to be wearing them.
• The Woobie: William thought Snow White died when they were children, and has been wracked with guilt for most of his life because he wanted to go back and rescue her. He finds out that she's alive and right after he gets her back, she seemingly dies again while he was sleeping.

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