The struggle was real. It was a constant fight to stay awake. Twice I succumbed to the Sandman only to wake up in the same dream. "Gretel & Hansel" tried to put me out again but I was determined to stay awake and torture myself.
There's no mystery what the premise of this movie is about. Everyone knows the age old story of "Hansel & Gretel." A young brother and sister go into the woods, they find a house made of delicious treats, they eat from the house, get captured by a witch who fattens them up to eat them except they escape and kill her.
The story has been retold, remixed, and redone several times both literarily and cinematically. The last cinematic version I saw was with Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton in "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" (2013). That was more of a Hansel & Gretel the adult years where they hunt other witches to prevent other kids from getting eaten or worse.
This version tries to go the scary route. It was dark and ominous the majority of the movie. They also wanted to give it a new age spin by making Gretel the main focus as you can probably gather by the title: "Gretel & Hansel." They have followed the Hollywood trend of other movies that have taken known and established stories or franchises and remade them to have a feminine focus. Look no further than "Star Wars," "Terminator," "Ghostbusters," "Ocean's 11," and others. It's lazy and it's a disservice. The movies are trash--not because they are feminine centric, but because writers are just rehashing something that has made goo gobs of money and gave them heroines as though that is somehow fresh, radical, or unique. It's none of those. It's tired, lazy, and lame. Do something new and original and maybe, just maybe, it will be good.
In "Gretel & Hansel" Gretel was the older sister and, for the most part, caretaker of Hansel. While wandering the woods in a state of near starvation they found the witch's house. The witch was a child eater, but she only wanted to eat Hansel and not Gretel. In Gretel she saw power and wanted to help her cultivate that power. Hansel, as the witch explained, was only weighing Gretel down. If she would only let him go, then she would be free. Read: if women would only discard the shackles known as men then they could realize their true potential. That same message was intimated elsewhere in the movie when Gretel called the witch "misses" and the witch said, "I'm not married. Do you see a ball and chain on me."
If the message wasn't clear enough from the two aforementioned examples, then there were three men in the movie to make the "male bad, female good" message stronger. Of the three men, one was morally reprehensible, one was some sort of animal, and one was chivalrous. So, two of the three men were dangerous while one was good. If that was analogous to real life then that's sad. I only hope that I'm of the 1/3rd that are good.
Gretel finds the strength to save her brother from being eaten, but she also lets him go. The boy was all of nine years old at the oldest and yet he is a male so she had to cut him loose to be the goddess she was meant to be. It's a pathetic retelling of a classic in which neither Hansel nor Gretel was the dominant character. Maybe one day Hollywood writers will be creative for a change. And maybe pigs will fly.
