The Huntsman: Winter's War

2016 "The story before Snow White"
6.1| 1h54m| PG-13| en| More Info
Released: 22 April 2016 Released
Producted By: Universal Pictures
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://www.thehuntsmanmovie.com/
Synopsis

As two evil sisters prepare to conquer the land, two renegades—Eric the Huntsman, who aided Snow White in defeating Ravenna in Snowwhite and the Huntsman, and his forbidden lover, Sara—set out to stop them.

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Reviews

Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System
SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
Staci Frederick Blistering performances.
gcsman I saw this recently on Netflix; I enjoyed it and now I kind of wish I'd seen it in the theater. As a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) which had reasonable and well deserved success, this one stands up well. The first one took the bare bones of the Snow White fairy tale (the captive princess, the evil witch queen, dwarfs, the poisoned apple, and a prince) and built a lot of extra stuff around it to make a thoroughly enjoyable 2 hours of fantasy-adventure. This second one is an entirely new story owing almost nothing to the fairytale but again, it's a fun 2 hours with many of the same advantages: great atmospheric wilderness settings, characters with at least a little bit of depth to them, and overall a good-natured feel to it -- yes, evil has its innings, the perils are convincingly dire and frightening, but we know that love and goodness will triumph.There are 4 almost-equal lead actors (Chris Hemsworth, Jessica Chastain, Emily Blunt, Charlize Theron), so lots of star power -- and can you think of ANY other fantasy adventure with three female leads? I can't. Sign of things to come, I hope. They're all good. Just like in the first one, Hemsworth isn't the imperious God of Thunder here; he plays an action hero all right, bumore of an affable guy. He's kind of clumsy at times, and the fight scenes tend to be a bit of a mess. Winning ugly is more his style here. Of the leads, Hemsworth (Australian) and Chastain (American) affect Scottish accents, and pretty strong ones too. Blunt (English) and Theron (South African), on the other hand, stick to fairly normal movie-American accents. Theron plays Ravenna once again as an irredeemably and self-indulgently evil queen and chews the scenery along the way -- but isn't that just what an evil fairytale queen is supposed to do? She sells it. Blunt provides a nice contrast as her sister. She's been pushed into evil position, but isn't irredeemable. I won't give away the surprises that come along as the characters mix and match, but they give the storyline added richness.The settings and set designs are I think first-rate. They have almost a Middle-Earth kind of feel to them. Blunt's snow-queen hairdo by itself is totally impressive -- a lot of thought went into that, and much else besides. Ravenna, who could turn herself into a flock of evil black birds in Snow White, can do the same this time but the birds now are golden, a result of her absorption by the mirror and her only half-present state.And, we get some dwarfs again, this time with two men and two women (though once again, they are normal-size actors and actresses visually de-sized on the screen. Hmm -- there are actual dwarf actors available who might like the work, so why not?). They provide most of the comic relief, but in a nicely different way than with the seven in Snow White; there's a lot of fun byplay amongst the two pairs, and all four have clearly different personalities.As a whole the story is surprisingly good! It's not a trite, by-the-numbers production that so many sequels are. It keeps a number of things that worked in the first one, but goes its own course. Best of all, the plot and dialog are sometimes unpredictable -- there are real twists. I also liked that the film borrowed certain settings and background from the first film without explaining them all over again. For example, interesting fairy creatures in the woods hop in and out (so no, they weren't all destroyed in the first outing, thankfully) but almost never actually influence any of the goings-on; they're just around to add charm. If you want to gauge how much thought goes into a movie or stage play production, a good indicator is often to look at how much is going on in the background.Not deep, but well done entertainment. If you've been missing Lord of the Rings-type movies, this one and its predecessor will keep you going.
krokoschilla So, it's been a while since I've seen this movie so this might not be all that accurate, but who cares? I watched this movie when it first came out because while the first one wasn't all that brilliant Charlize Theron was a treasure and it seemed like she'd be in it a lot. And she did return. For the last ten minutes. Maybe twenty. It seemed as though the focus would be on the Ice Queen and Ravenna a lot more than it was at the end, most of the story was about the Huntsman and his wife, a story arc that was completely uninteresting. The wife had no real character to speak of and was relatively two-dimensional. You couldn't have completely taken out of the story, I'll admit that, because she did have to be there for at least a few plot points, but there were a lot of scenes where they just walked around and nothing really seemed to happen. It worked in LOTR. It didn't work in this movie. The Ice Queen was also pretty boring, with barely anything to do. The only thing interesting about this movie was every scene with Charlize Theron, which were preciously rare. The relationship between the Ice Queen and Ravenna, the twisted sisterhood would have been interesting to see developed, as well as Ravenna's transformation from a strange but human witch to a strange human/witch/mirror hybrid. The final action scene did have some interesting things but it was sad to see this powerful Ice Queen be defeated by her sister so quickly, only for a human to defeat her. He's a badass but you'd still think the other woman with powers would do more. It seemed wrong to have one of the most powerful characters suddenly take a back seat, espescially since I doubt this would've happened had it been an Ice King.Sadly, I'm probably still gonna watch it if there's ever another movie with Charlize Theron in this franchise.
James Hitchcock You've heard of "Hamlet" without the Prince. Now we have "Snow White" without the Princess. "The Huntsman: Winter's War" is, officially, both a prequel and sequel to "Snow White and the Huntsman"- the action takes place both before and after the events of the first film- but Snow White does not actually appear in it, even though she is mentioned on a couple of occasions. The film also borrows a few ideas from "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen, or possibly from "Frozen", the Disney adaptation of Andersen's story.Although Snow White does not appear, Charlize Theron's evil Queen Ravenna returns from the earlier film. The main villainess, however, is Ravenna's younger sister Freya, who rules her own kingdom, a land of ice and snow, in the far north, and who remains in power even after Ravenna has been overthrown. As the title implies, Chris Hemsworth's Huntsman also returns. We learn that, in this context, the word "Huntsman" does not necessarily mean "man who hunts animals". The Huntsmen are the elite troops of Freya's army, trained in the arts of war from childhood, and Hemsworth's character, Eric, is one of these. He incurs Freya's displeasure, however, when he falls in love with a female Huntsman, Sara. (Freya's army is an equal opportunities employer). As Freya has replaced the Ten Commandments with one of her own, "thou shalt not love", Eric is banished from the kingdom and Sara put to death.I won't set out the rest of the plot because it is essentially a mish-mash of clichés drawn from every sword-and-sorcery adventure you've ever seen. I said above that the film borrows from "The Snow Queen"; it also borrows heavily- as do most modern sword-and-sorceries- from "Lord of the Rings", both Tolkien's novel and Peter Jackson's three films. Like "Lord of the Rings" it revolves around an evil ruler trying to get his/her hands on a magical artefact, in this case Ravenna's magic mirror, which will give him/her immense power. In both cases the aforesaid evil ruler is opposed by an assorted group of good guys, in this case Eric and a few dwarfs, both male and female. (It is a general rule of the fantasy genre that dwarfs and elves are good, trolls and goblins evil). Besides the dwarfs, Eric also has the assistance of Sara, rumours of whose death prove to have been much exaggerated. (That's not a spoiler. No film company is going to hire a major star like Jessica Chastain and kill her off in the first reel).Although this is officially an American film, only one of the actors playing the main characters is American; Hemsworth is Australian, Theron South African and Emily Blunt (Freya) British. The one exception is Chastain, and even she does not sound American. Like a number of the other characters she speaks her lines in what is supposed to be a Scottish accent. Now I was not worried that some of these accents were not completely accurate- the action takes place in a fairy-tale fantasy world, not in the real Scotland- but I did wonder why an American studio were making a film using accents that many American viewers would have difficulty with.I never really thought of Blunt as being a Charlize Theron look-alike, but here the two actresses are made up to look convincingly similar; you could certainly take them for sisters. Where Blunt has difficulty is in trying to suggest a difference in personality. The script suggests that, unlike the bad-through-and-through Ravenna, Freya may not be completely evil and that she may have a softer side to her character, although she keeps it well hidden. (Ravenna, for example, would probably have killed both Eric and Sara outright rather than letting them live). Blunt never, however, really suggests this in her portrayal; the most that comes across is that Freya is only 99% evil, which is not such a big improvement on the full hundred. Theron herself was rather splendid in "Snow White and the Huntsman", but does not make the same impression here.I am old enough to remember just how bad fantasy films could be in the pre-Jackson era. (Think, if you can bear to, of "Conan the Barbarian" or "Prince Valiant"). Even otherwise distinguished directors could make fools of themselves when they ventured into this territory, Ridley Scott's "Legend" and Richard Fleischer's spectacularly awful "Red Sonja" being cases in point Admittedly, in the 2010s no film could get away with special effects as inadequate as those used in "Red Sonja" and other eighties adventures, and those in "The Huntsman: Winter's War" are generally well done, but that is no more than we have come to expect from the genre in recent years. Visual effects alone, however, are not enough; those film-makers who want to emulate Jackson's achievement need a story as good as Tolkien's, a literate script and first-class acting, and those are all qualities in which this film is deficient. "Snow White and the Huntsman" is not in the "Lord of the Rings" class, but it still has plenty to enjoy. Not so its successor. 4/10
edwagreen Even beautiful cinematography cannot save this 2016 film with Charlize Theron portraying an evil queen who starts off the film by killing her husband or lover during a game of chest. This cold calculating character with a miserable veneer is absolutely loveless and when she sees her sister in love with the man who fathered the latter's child, she has the baby and lover put to death and it takes the entire film for her sister to discover this evil deed.The sister goes off to another land with hatred in her heart and raises an army. Miraculously, Theron's empire begins to fall apart as her sister goes on from one victory to another.The sister raises an army of children where they are told to be devoid of love and have a sense of duty to the kingdom coming first in all matters of life.Naturally, two youngsters there grow up and find love only to be punished by the evil queen.It's a good thing that Snow White, whose kingdom is under attack, does not appear in this rather icy film.