… stays in the film… for-ever. Which is troublesome when what happens in editing and post-production is what happened to Snow White and the Huntsman.
Which must haunt actors, editors, camera operators, and everyone else subject to the pressure of studios and of directors. (I don’t know who’s to blame in this case: director Rupert Sanders I’ve never heard of before, so it may not be his fault — or it just may — but someone really screwed up the film.)
Not that I had very high expectations for the film in the first place (Chris Hemsworth has not yet really impressed me, to be frank, and I always lower my expectations of any film he is in), but there are cuts that loom like gaping absences. Like, how Snow White learns to use a shield or sword, or gets presented with armor that she can actually walk around in. (Plate armor is not light; she grew up in a tower with no exercise and, we’re supposed to believe, crappy food. There’s no way she’s running around in breastplate and mail.)
Or the part where Snow White’s emotional connection with that archer guy from her childhood gets reignited. Or the tension between Thor, er, I mean, the Huntsman and the archer dude, since it’s supposed to be some kind of love triangle.
Yeah, this is one of those films where you learn a lot about storytelling by observing someone else’s accidents. Maybe there was pressure to put more CGI into the thing (to the point where it overwhelmed story, and story got edged out); maybe they were over-ambitious about getting it out soon after the other Snow White movie (Mirror Mirror, which we didn’t even bother to see); maybe they didn’t have the script nailed down and decided to tidy up the story in post-production. Whatever happened, the story got shattered and glued back together, and the cracks are very, very visible.
I wish we’d seen Prometheus instead… though, of course, it wasn’t playing in Yeokgok yet anyway. But hell, even the new Men in Black threequel would have been better.