I started watching the movie expecting to watch something magical and beautiful. Instead I found myself watching a very weak movie with really bad acting from all the actors.
I absolutely DESPISE the way the snow queen talks she sounds like she's about to rape somebody. The acting, characters, story, and visuals were all disgustingly cheap.
This movie! I watched it when I was young and after 10 years in watching it again and I'm still in love.
I have probably watched the movie 4 or 5 times. Every time, i get more and more impressed by how far the wish of a young heart can go, and the strenght of both Kai and Gertha to struggle for what they believe in.
This movie is sweet and touching and even a bit frightening at times, but that is purely at the beginning and end. The middle three vignettes in which the heroine meets the spring, summer, and autumn witches is too long, too unnecessary, and tedious and boring.
I bought this film thinking it was a foreign import that I had seen many years ago, but nonesuch was the case. The film I was looking for was "The Polar Bear King", a Norwegian production dealing with a very similar story about a young princess searching for her abducted prince.
My main attraction was that I absolutely love the original Snow Queen story and always have done, for me it is one of Hans Christian Andersen's best stories. So naturally I would see any adaptation of it, regardless of the company or who was in it.
This 3-hour made-for-TV miniseries came home with us from Blockbuster's this weekend. The production company clearly spent a lot of money on sets, costuming (Bridget Fonda, especially), and special effects (including a great Jim Henson talking polar bear & reindeer).
"Snow Queen" is based, of course, on the fairy tale of the same name, collected in (at least) Andersen's Fairy Tales - and, unlike many other recent productions based on other fairy tales, this one retains the spirit of Faerie, an accomplishment not easy and not well understood by many, especially among Americans. Talking animals, arbitrary prohibitions, appearances of goblins, dragons, and demons, are not to be questioned in a fairy tale; they are as natural an element of Faerie as, say, gravity is in the scientific world, and the reason or explanation for them is completely beside the point of the story.
