BEFORE: The Hollywood sexual harassment scandals are blowing up now, with more charges being filed every day against some of the industry's biggest producers/a-holes, and finally I'm seeing charges being brought against someone who I knew in college, who was a complete jerk then to me and others, so it seems his personality hasn't changed at all. I sort of hate to admit to this, but I'm really going to enjoy watching him get blackballed, and lose all of his money and career opportunities. Maybe I'm not a perfect person, because I do carry around spite for people who have wronged me - but then again, 30 years is a long time to wait for some payback, so why not let myself enjoy it?
Chris Hemsworth carries over from "Snow White and the Huntsman", as do at least three other actors.
THE PLOT: Eric and fellow warrior Sara, raised as members of Ice Queen Freya's army, try to conceal their forbidden love as they fight to survive the wicked intentions of both Freya and her sister Ravenna.
AFTER: Before the recent big Hollywood sex scandals, before Weinstein and before Cosby even, there was the Kristen Stewart scandal - she'd been dating Robert Pattinson (this was back when she was straight) and then started dating Rupert Sanders, who directed her in "Snow White and the Huntsman". Once the news came out, Sanders found himself fired from both the franchise and his marriage to Liberty Ross, who also appeared in last night's film as Snow White's mother in the flashback scenes. Kristen Stewart wasn't asked back for this prequel/sequel either, so someone faced the arduous task of writing a new Snow White franchise film without Snow White in it. And the directing reins were given to a first-time director, so all of that goes to explain how we end up with the jumbled mess that is "The Huntsman: Winter's War".
So they created a new evil queen, Freya, who has powers related to ice and cold, and has to constantly keep her emotions in check, so any resemblance to Elsa from "Frozen" is purely coincidental (right...). And she's connected to the origin of the Huntsman, now called Eric to distinguish him from the other huntsmen and huntswomen. So in the prequel part we get to see where Eric came from, how he was raised and how he fell in love with Sara, the wife he was talking about in the first film. But wait, he said she was dead, how can she be back in this film?
Ah, but it's a fantasy film, and she was only MOSTLY dead. Same goes for Queen Ravenna, who's also brought back thanks to the magic of the Magic Mirror. The goal here is to recapture the mirror, which Snow White got rid of because it was making her have bad, nasty thoughts (did it tell her to sleep with the film's director?) so she brought it to the forest where the soldiers carrying it were killed, and it got seized by goblins, who love big shiny things. There's an implication here that perhaps the mirror caused everyone around it to fight each other, even if they were allies, but this concept never really got explored to any reasonable satisfying depth.
So Snow White's husband sends Eric the Huntsman back into the dark forest to locate the mirror, along with one of the dwarves from the first film and his half-brother, and they're joined by two more female dwarves, and also Eric's not-dead wife Sara, so we're back doing the Tolkien mixed-race quest through the forest again, right? NITPICK POINT: Anyone who's ever played Dungeons and Dragons knows that most female dwarves have beards, and are almost undistinguishable from male dwarves. But I guess that wouldn't go over too well in a Hollywood film.
The other scandal involved with this franchise is that they had regular-sized actors playing the dwarves in both films, so that theoretically takes jobs away from smaller actors - sizeism? But it's a
little more clear to me this time that the visual effects used a combination of live-action tricks (like having the tall actors stand in holes, with the camera shooting them only from the waist up) and using little people as doubles for the long-shots. So little people WERE employed, they probably just weren't paid as much. But go ahead, find me some tiny actors who are as famous as Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins and such. Really, you'd end up hiring Peter Dinklage, Warwick Davis, Martin Klebba and a bunch of scrubs, so I see why they did what they did. Progress is made in small steps, no pun intended.
But Freya ends up with the mirror, and uses it to bring Ravenna back (or some entity that looks just like her, we're never really sure...) and then it's all hands on deck with the huntsmen and the dwarves to take down both evil queens. Defeat the evil power and restore peace and justice to the land, yada yada yada.
Also starring Charlize Theron (also carrying over from "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Jessica Chastain (last seen in "The Martian"), Emily Blunt (last seen in "Sicario"), Nick Frost (also carrying over from "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Sam Claflin (ditto), Rob Brydon (last seen in "Cinderella"), Alexandra Roach (last seen in "Anna Karenina"), Sheridan Smith (last seen in "Hysteria"), Sam Hazeldine (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Sope Dirisu, Sophie Cookson (last seen in "Kingsman: The Secret Service"), Colin Morgan (last seen in "Legend"), Madeleine Worrall (last seen in "Paddington"), a quick cameo from Kristen Stewart, and the voices of Fred Tatasciore, Liam Neeson (last seen in "Ted 2").
RATING: 4 out of 10 chess pieces
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