With all the turmoil besetting the real world, you’d think there might be more important things to inflate into controversies than the pre-release kerfuffles that have plagued “Snow White.” As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature. And I say that as someone who mostly doesn’t like them. Yes, I’ve enjoyed a couple (“Cinderella,” “The Lion King”).

I don’t actually know how to judge these live-action Disney remakes on any relative scale of quality. The bar is so low, and what people seem to want from them — a tickle of nostalgia, the familiar rendered new on a technicality, 109 minutes of child-friendly distraction — feels so different from the usual standards. So: Snow White is not as bad as it could be, while not being anywhere near good? It’s better than, say, 2019’s Aladdin, which was awful but nevertheless made a literal billion dollars.

At the 11th Academy Awards in 1939, Shirley Temple presented Walt Disney with an honorary Oscar — a statuette accompanied by seven miniatures. It was, of course, a nod to his animation Snow White, which the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein had called “the greatest film ever made”.

Disney had a Hollywood “premiere” for its new live-action “Snow White” that did not have the usual excitement — no guests were on hand; only Disney’s employees were present. The red carpet remained rolled up.

The House of Mouse took the charming 1937 classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — beloved by millions — and turned it into a feminist rant.

Its star, Rachel Zegler, spouts the most awful drivel.

The deafening anti-buzz surrounding Disney’s latest “live-action” remake of one of their animated properties (the 1937 title Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) is not only justified, it actually underestimated just how toe-curlingly terrible the film would turn out to be.

Can you find it in your heart to pity Disney? Me neither. But if ever a film could make you feel sorry for all involved, it is the new Snow White, the animated classic now mostly reimagined as live action. Of course, whatever the company does is grist to the long American culture war. But there were always going to be particular issues when reworking this legacy property for contemporary tastes — the deeply pre-feminist 1937 fairytale once described by Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage as a “backward story of seven dwarfs living in the cave”. 

Walt Disney Studios’s new "Snow White" film is having a tough opening weekend.

Not only is the film projected to have the lowest opening weekend among the studio’s live-action remakes so far, the movie is getting bombarded with bad reviews. 

"The movie does earn points as a bedtime story, however, because it will definitely put you to sleep," Rolling Stone critic David Fear quipped in his review. 

At this point, Disney’s live-action princesses should be able to sue for damages. Snow White, like The Little Mermaid before it, has thrust a promising new star into the centre of a lazily conceived, visually repellent remake, depending entirely on her talents to drive its machine. But it’s offered her nothing in return – not on screen nor support behind the scenes, considering our new Ariel and Snow White, Halle Bailey and Rachel Zegler respectively, are both women of colour targeted by rampant racist abuse online.

A YouTuber's homemade Tesla test looks like something straight out of a children's cartoon.

CrunchLabs founder and former NASA engineer Mark Rober put Tesla's Autopilot through its paces to see if it could detect the same road obstacles as a vehicle that uses LiDAR — a system that Elon Musk has previously called a "fool's errand."

The verdict? Kind of.

The automatic driving features of a Tesla car have been put to the test with a fake "Wile E. Coyote wall" by an engineering YouTuber, and it didn't go as Tesla CEO Elon Musk might have hoped.

Mark Rober, who has over 65 million subscribers on YouTube, tested the vehicle's autonomous cameras by driving at a screen with an exact replica of the road behind it, in the style of a Looney Tunes sketch. The car was unable to detect the wall, crashing directly through it.

Newsweek contacted Tesla for comment via email.