Snow Queen (2002)

Wow, this is a REALLY bad movie!

Really Surprised!

Crappy film

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I fret saw this sprawling romantic fantasy epic years ago when it premiered as a television mini series and I found it to be something special and loved it right away, it felt like this big fantasy adventure, a love story and a Christmas movie all rolled into one. When I watch this 'movie' which is always sometime in December, I'm always drawn in by the atmosphere and colourful visuals, there's so much attention to detail in the sets and costumes, it wasn't a super-high budgeted production but they were highly creative with what they had and it has a fantastic look. Anyway to me despite it being perhaps a bit too long, I still find it very fun and festive to unwind with during the chilly holidays. It's a big movie but I personally don't find it boring, there's a lot that goes on in it once it gets going and once I start watching I'm in for the long haul and have to watch it to the very end, there's something about it that I find very engaging and it cruises through the long story with a competence that most TV-produced short fantasy series fail to achieve, and happy sad or awed, you get a lot of emotional bang for your buck with "Snow Queen". Watching it is like being locked in jail but you love the warden! I like it best in the second chunk of the story where Gerda embarks on her quest to find her bewitched boyfriend and the Snow Queen and encounters the three other sister witches of the seasons who each act as obstacles to her final goal and are all selfish, possessive, and various degrees of crazy! It's not exactly what you'd call a linear story arc, a lot of it is pretty surreal and even metaphorical, there are points where you don't actually know which direction it's going to go in next, but it keeps a sense of strange reality about itself and has a good balance between the dramatic and fantastical and for me the overall presentation is a most enchanting one. I think the characters are good enough and make it work, Chelsea Hobbs is boring at first but as she traverses her very layered journey she really grows as a character and gains the strength and courage to face and defeat a foe who's far more powerful than she is by awakening her lost inner warmth and humanity and free her boyfriend's frozen spirit. Jeremy Guilbaut was so impossibly adorable in this, I had such a huge crush on him when I first watched it and I thought he had the face of an angel! He could play the cutie but also a jerk really well, so he was good for the part. I truly thought that Bridget Fonda made an awesome Snow Queen. She was hauntingly beautiful, vain, powerful and commanding, was self-centred, had a cruel sense of humour and was quick to anger and everything she did including essentially sacrificing many young men that she had enslaved to her will over who knows how long, was for the sole purpose of the virtually impossible task of reassembling the thousands of shards of a magic mirror forged by the devil himself that would give her the power to cast an eternal winter and reign supreme over the other seasons... I loved how it wasn't like she was only wicked and nothing else, she had an enigmatic tone to her character, like she wasn't always so completely cold and heartless, but had at some point been corrupted by something, which eventually turns out to be true. I loved all of the gripping scenes with her and Kai which stay in the same frozen hopeless place while Gerda travels throughout the seasonal realms. I also liked the touch of how the Snow Queen's domain was an icy version of the hotel, I find that quite clever in how it played into the theme if Kai's cold heart as well as Gerda's father's. I still love this and feel drawn to watching it around Christmas, I find it an uplifting and satisfying watch. It deserves a lot more love and to be remembered better than what it has been, and I'd suggest while watching it that you try to see beyond the kinks and look at the bigger picture of its story and try to enjoy it for what it is. Recommended to fans of fantasy and romance, the young and the young at heart. Truly magical. X

I thought the movie started out a bit slow and disjointed for the first hour. However, it became more absorbing, fascinating, and surprising in its last two hours. So, while it starts out like a cheap horror film, it evolves into a beautiful and wonderful fantasy film.Bridget Fonda stands out as the Snow Queen. This was her best performance and it is sad that this apparently was her last performance, as she has not acted in the last 7 years. She absolutely personifies both the beauty and coldness of Winter.My daughter, age 14, found the film a bit frightening, so if you are showing it as family entertainment, please stay with your child and reassure her or him that it is just a fairy tale fantasy and not to take it too seriously.It is really one of the best fantasy films that I have seen in a long time, slightly better than "Eragon" or any of the "Lord of the Rings." It is about as good as "The Golden Compass".

"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. Nor is the story bound by modern Hollywood rules of composition: direct, often to the point of being grotesquely linear in lesser works, and obvious (in retrospect, at least).With this defence against the common criticisms of those who do not understand fairy tales, "Snow Queen" is a delightful movie with wonderful visual effects, skillful acting, and great sentiment. The only flaw in the movie was, I think, not that it was too fantastical but that certain parts of the dialogue were too glaringly modern in slang and expression, a mar on its otherwise timeless nature.

Hallmark wowed me with Gulliver's Travels back in the day. Even the remake of Snow White, while kind of freakish, but beautiful with Kristin Kreuk in it was a helluva lot better than this lumbering hulk of garbage.That said, please understand that I am a loyalist, and The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid were my two favorite fairy tales of all time (you could say that Hans Christen Anderson was my first favorite author- I even liked Danny Kaye as Hans in the movie). I disliked the fact that Gerda and Kay(Kai) were so much older, and their little flirtation with romance, it felt heavy handed and false. There's no way that just after a couple of months and one kiss Gerda would chase off after Kay. Even with his silly Help Me note.That said, I think that the bits with Kay and the Snow Queen could have been considerably edited down, and more time spent with Gerda on her travels. I am not sure about the poster who said that there was no robber girl, but there was. I do know that the travelling thru the seasons was added because of the whole "the mirror is the devils creation and he gave it to the seasons..." bs storyline. Which, of course, is utter tripe.As far as being beautifully shot; sure, if you like white. Everything frm the frozen land looked as if it had been sprayed with canned snow, nothing really looked good. I didn't really like what they did to the snow queen; all in all, it was a complete disappointment to me. ESP the fact that I rented it and didn't think to remember that since it was hallmark it was probably a freaking miniseries or at least a two part movie. Christ I have been sitting in front of the tv for close to four hours!Two thumbs down, and a very bad rating. The acting is horrible, and the only thing I truly liked was the clothes.