Foreverisacastironmess123 Review of Snow Queen

Snow Queen (2002)

"Doesn't it just make your heart run cold with joy?"

[9/10 · 20 December 2016]

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