This is one of those movies where the publicity around the movie overwhelmed the movie itself, and therefore robbed it of being able to make its own impressions and be judged on its own merits. That's unfortunate, because this is a good fantasy fairy tale movie. Not great, mind you, but good nonetheless (which is the reason for my rating).

When I first saw some footage of Doc, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, Grumpy, Happy, and Dopey in their cottage, I was disappointed by the lack of quality animation, but that must have been some very early footage, as these CGI animated characters exhibit none of the stilted movements I observed. This movie is a "live action retelling" of Disney's classic 1937 animated movie, but our seven friends are completely CGI while everyone else (except for the animals) are played by actors.

The 1937 version of this story is considered a classic. It was Disney's first animated feature film and it features some great music, so even if you've never seen the movie, you've probably heard "Heigh Ho!" and "Whistle While You Work" and others. I'm not a huge fan of the 1937 movie, so I didn't go into watching this one with any raised expectations and bars that had to be cleared for me to enjoy it.

Given all that, I did enjoy this movie. It's as if someone got the filmmakers together and told them about this movie that Disney made back at the very beginning and that they have been tasked with telling the story again, but with some new elements. As a result, it's not a scene-by-scene reenactment of the original and I think it's better for it in many ways. Rachel Zegler does a good job in the titular role, but Gal Gadot misfires nearly every time she's on the screen (which was unexpected). This live action movie is much campier than I expected it to be. The tendency with contemporary retellings is to go darker and introduce more gray areas in character developments and storylines, and the choice here to have a Broadway-style musical number that made me think of "Chicago" was an interesting one.

The result is a very enjoyable way to spend nearly two hours. Is it worth owning and watching over and over again? No, but neither was the first one. If anything, the movie should have chapter markers for the various musical numbers so one could enjoy those without having to manually hunt for them. It's possible that the physical disc has such markers, but I did not notice that the Disney+ version I watched had them.