The vibe I got from Marc Webb’s Snow White, more than anything else, was just a staggering sense of hubris. On the one hand, it should be an easy film to ignore, and certainly much of the mainstream audience appeared to do just that when it was released to cinemas. Now available on streaming service Disney+, it offers an opportunity for more sceptical viewers to give it a chance. Honestly I would not rush with that; it failed in cinemas for a reason, and if it is engaging family-oriented fantasy you are craving Disney has produced literally dozens of stronger examples.

On the other hand, it feels genuinely disgraceful that Disney allowed this production to exist. Walt Disney’s animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was the company’s first, and remains a proper masterpiece of 20th century cinema. It is 12 years shy of being a century old, and yet it still holds up due to a superb attention to detail, hand-crafted talent, and enormous human effort. There was plenty of room, had Disney particularly wanted to produce a live-action adaptation of the Snow White fairy tale, for a fresh or inventive take. Instead Webb’s film picks and chooses from the original film’s iconography, and generally doing a ham-fisted job of it.

The film is positively soaked in wretched-looking CGI, particularly the iconic seven dwarfs who fall into a disastrous uncanny valley between their original animated appearance and something crudely photo-realistic. Other elements, such as the costuming, looked effective in animation but appear remarkably shoddy and cheap here. Star Rachel Zegler – whose work in Spielberg’s West Side Story I really appreciated – looks less like Snow White and more like a sorority girl on her way to a Halloween party. Gal Gadot, who plays the evil witch queen of the pieces, almost entirely lacks a sense of menace.

It is almost impossible to engage with the story, because the film has been made almost entirely with unrealistic CGI backgrounds. There is no gravity to the characters, and no depth to their adventures. Even some small effort to invigorate the story is rapidly abandoned when it become clear that the climax is due. There are some new songs, courtesy of Benji Pasek and Justin Paul. They jar badly with what original songs remain, suggesting the film would have been much better off sticking with one style or the other.

This is spectacularly tone-deaf stuff, like taking a masterpiece from a gallery and replacing with a child’s enthused scrawlings, or covering a priceless sculpture with some finger painting. Most of Disney’s remakes have been forgettable at best. This one joins Tim Burton’s Dumbo in being actively awful stuff. It is hard to imagine those who made it not being at least a little embarrassed. The executives who pushed it into production should be actively ashamed.