The huntsman: winter's war - 2016

A good enough movie, I liked it enough, the actresses were great, the story has holes but the visuals were great. 

It is much better than SnowWhite and the Huntsman, mainly because there is no SnowWhite here and the Queens have a bigger role. 

There are four characters (“tall” people playing dwarves) that are supposed to be the comedy relief. The actors did ok, mind you, but I think they were written very much over the line, Gryff was unbearable and an idiot, Nion was just stupid, why was the huntsman bringing them along? 

Actors:

Emily Blunt is very good, she did a marvellous job here. Freya looks innocent at first, then you can see on her face how she ‘lost her mind’ because of her grief; there is fragility in her strength, she does evil things because she’s heartbroken, crazy with grief, the pain was too much and she blocked it all down to go on.

Charlize Theron is also good, although we have no explanation here on why she is so evil. It sounds like the mirror has taken control over her, but it is not explained.

Jessica Chastain does her role well, and Chris Hemsworth is as handsome as ever.

We see Ravenna gaining power by marrying a king and then killing him, taking the power and making it grow, while at her side there is her sister Freya who is not like her. She has no magic and doesn’t want to have it, she fell in love with a man and thinks it will be forever. Ravenna tells her that love doesn’t exist, that it always ends in pain, but Freya believes in her love and gives birth to a daughter. One night she finds the baby’s room on fire and her lover who just put the baby’s cot on fire, and her power comes out, freezing the man who crashes on the ground and shatters.

Freya becomes the ice queen, she renounces all kinds of love, she goes to the North and becomes a queen, she wages war over the local villages, killing the adults and taking their kids, that she raises as her personal soldiers. She tells them that love is a weakness, a lie, that she saved them from it, and that they must become strong without it, and they train all the time, all of them.

Eric and Sara are the best, and all of a sudden she’s all over him, giving him her pendant saying that she is marrying him, and they make a shared promise to always be together, in life and in death… just like that, yesterday they were just fellow soldiers and now they are married, everlasting love and all that… pretty quick, huh?!?

Anyway, it was dangerous and the queen found out immediately by having one of her icy owls spying on them, so when they try to meet up again they are surrounded by the others, and even the queen. She tells them that if they can reach her they can go free, so they fight everyone who tries to stop them, but then the queen raises an ice wall that separates them. 

From Eric’s pov, we see that Tull killed Sara, and he was barely knocked unconscious. He was thrown into a river but he survived. 

We are told that it is at this point that the other movie takes place. Eric goes south and helps SnowWhite defeat Ravenna, all the while mourning for his lost wife.

Now SnowWhite’s husband finds him to tell him that she’s not well (because she spent too much time looking at the evil mirror… whyever did she do that??) and also and most importantly that the mirror has gone missing and they must find it again and lock it up.

Freya’s soldiers have conquered all the north, but now that she knows about the mirror she wants to conquer the south as well.

Eric goes with the two male dwarves and finds SnowWhite’s men killed where the mirror was stolen, then they are attacked inside a bar by Freya’s other huntsmen but is saved by Sara.

Dun-dun-dun, Sara is alive and also pretty pissed off because that day, when he saw her killed, she saw him simply leaving her behind. The ice wall was enchanted by the queen, apparently, which would explain a lot because it made no sense to me that Tull would kill her just like that.

She joins them in the search for the mirror, then they fall into a dwarves’ trap and are joined by two female dwarves as well. 

They find the mirror by battling the goblins who took it (many were already dead, the mirror makes people fight against each other) then Freya shows up with her soldiers and reveals that Sara was acting on her orders, because love is not real and all that blahblahblah.

As proof, Freya tells Sara to kill him, and she… sort of does. Her arrows never miss, and she hit him where he had her pendant so that she did not kill him, it only hurt a bit.

Freya takes the mirror to her castle, and then she asks… who is the fairest of them all??? Why, what does she care about that???

Anyway, Ravenna comes out of the mirror. Instead of a formless human-sized golden-coloured shape like it used to, this time it takes the shape of Ravenna, and then she loses the golden color to appear as the Ravenna we all know and love :) 

She says that when she was defeated she renounced her body to become part of the mirror, until Freya let her out.

—— The scenes here were quite impressive, you know, Freya’s realm was all icy while Ravenna is bright gold and black.

Eric sneaks inside the castle with the intent of killing Freya like a sniper, but unfortunately Ravenna was there to intercept the arrow. Sara also tries to attack her, but is easily stopped.

They are both sentenced to death, but Eric gives a speech on how they used to love each other, how they loved their parents before Freya had them killed, and now Tull and many others join them against the Queen. It is Ravenna though that attacks them with magic, and Freya yells for her to stop hurting them. Ravenna doesn’t listen so she raises a big ice wall.

Ravenna speaks of how it is all thanks to her that Freya has her power, and so Freya learns the truth: the mirror told Ravenna that Freya’s baby would grow up to be the fairest of them all, so Ravenna used her magic on Freya’s lover to make him go and kill the baby.

Now it’s a sort of all-against-Ravenna, although Freya doesn’t do much fighting, she tries to freeze her with her magic, but Ravenna stabs her (she has no weapons but she is the mirror, so it’s like a changeling, she creates what she needs).

Eric fights hard against Ravenna, and a dying Freya helps him by freezing the mirror, so that Eric can destroy it.

Eric and Sara hurry in each other’s arms, Freya tells them how lucky they are (I know what she meant, that their love is real and alive and all that, but she still has a weird concept of “lucky” and “saved”, given that both Eric and Sara are orphans because of her and have their bodies covered in scars.