Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I recently took this off the shelf at my local video rental store because the picture on the box showed a white haired Bridget Fonda dressed in a beautiful sparkly white dress and a snow white cloak made of feathers. It looked to me like Hallmark Entertainment was going to at least try to do this film up right.
As it turned out, a lavish budget did provide many beautiful costumes, sets, and location scenery, but the simplicity and innocence of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale got lost in three hours of so-so acting, a poor screen play, dreadful dialog, bad film editing and lousy direction from David Wu.
In the original fairy tale the protagonists are two children named Kay and Gerda. In this film Kay has been changed to Kai and both Kai and Gerda are young adults who are in love.
One day Kai gets beguiled by the Snow Queen who rules the season of Winter and he is kidnapped and taken to her Ice Palace. Gerda begins a long (and in this film I do mean LONG) quest to discover his whereabouts and to rescue him. In order to do this she must travel through the lands of the other Seasons. She meets with the eccentric denizens of Spring, Summer and Autumn and each of them attempts to kidnap her. The idiosyncratic Andersen's take on the seasons was odd enough in the original story, but in this film is all the more exaggerated.
Kai has a talking Polar Bear (crafted with skill by Jim Henson's Creature Works) for a prison guard. His involvment with the polar bear is one of the many reasons this movie drags. Several ridiculous minutes are spent with Kai teaching the bear to ice-skate, for example.
The actors portraying Wolfgang, the father, Gerda, and Kai are tolerable if not note-worthy. Bridget Fonda, in my opinion, was not right for the part of the Snow Queen. Her performance is lackluster and she delivers her lines as though she's LaFemme Nikita rather than a character in a fairy tale. She looks the part but she doesn't seem particularly frosty or seductive as the script calls for her to be. Her lines are delivered in a flat emotionless way that I suppose is meant to be icy, but comes off as dull. You really wonder how in the world Kai could have been beguiled by such a person.
The interior sets, the costumes, the lighting...all the cosmetic trim of this film are beautiful and they are what made me so want to love this movie, but the magic is missing and I was never able to get swept away by the story.
At three hours in length and with a plot that focuses on mature themes of love lost, grief and seduction, even suicide, this film is most decidedly NOT for children of any age. Yet, with the corny talking bear and a talking reindeer and some really silly robber characters, I can't say it is a film for adults, either.
There is some really cheesy dialog that is too much like modern slang for example when the Summer Princess comments on Gerda's dress by saying, "That peasant look is so last year," or later when she asks Gerda, "Do I look a porker in this dress?"
There is a whole lot of trite symbolism featuring red roses that further takes up time for no real benefit. In the original story Andersen has a "demon" creating havok with a magical mirror but in the film the minor league demon has been changed to Satan himself and they actually say the mirror is crafted in Hell. They make the devil look really cliche in this film and I feel it was too heavy-handed and out of sync with the rest of the picture. Sadly, this production just doesn't work. Even with a big budget, lavish decorations and costumes, talented actors, and a story that has enchanted people for over a century and a half, it still falls flat. I'd say skip this one...and for sure, do not try to make your kids sit through it. It's no fun.
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