A Snow Globe Christmas

Every year, the market gets flooded with an influx of Christmas films. So many Christmas films, in fact, that many of them share similar titles, premises and even whole plotlines. This close similarity brought us to two films, Snowglobe and A Snow Globe Christmas, both about a woman who gets magically transported to a snow globe world and both featuring the same actress, Christina Milian, in two completely different roles. Though we typically shy away from relatively lesser-known Christmas films, our curiosity got the better of us and we ended up watching both of these in particular just to see how differently they executed the same premise. Without spoiling too much, we can safely say that one of them actually turned out fairly decent and the other was A Snow Globe Christmas.

Meg (Alicia Witt), a cynical TV executive, forces her employees to work long hours on Christmas Eve to finish production of a Christmas movie. As she struggles to complete the film, a woman named Sal (Christina Milian) mysteriously shows up on set and shows Meg a snow globe depicting a perfect town. Eager to get back to filming, Meg throws the snow globe, intent on breaking it, but is instead hit in the head and knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, she finds herself magically transported to the world inside the globe and married to Ted (Donald Faison), a local woodsman, with two children, Mia (Damoni Burkhardt) and Teddy Jr. (Hayden Faraday). Though she doesn’t believe it at first, she soon discovers that the town isn’t just a fantasy and, in the process of trying to escape, taints its perfection.

Much like a typical The Asylum release, A Snow Globe Christmas is, quite simply, painful to watch. Although it shares a similar premise with Snowglobe, the execution is far worse, due in part to featuring a rather unlikeable protagonist who makes too many poor decisions. Of course, these poor decisions are part of her character arc, but said arc feels pretty bland and predictable. Unlike Snowglobe where we understand the MC’s motivation for repeatedly escaping into the snow globe world, there’s less to go on with the lead of this film, with a rushed foundation that she’s a workaholic with a less than stellar boyfriend. The theme of “perfection vs imperfection” also feels rushed and unearned, especially when compared to its comparatively big budget counterpart.

Meg (Alicia Witt, right) spends much of her time in the snow globe town attracting
the attention of the mayor (Trevor Donovan, left), an analogue for her boyfriend Eric.

Even without comparing this film with Snowglobe, there’s no denying that the writing is not only terrible, starting with the setup of wrapping up production of a Christmas film on Christmas Eve of all dates, but inconsistent. Meg clearly likes Christmas, yet disrespects it at every opportunity. The audition process Meg introduces for the town’s Christmas pageant requires a two-page monologue, yet the children all end up auditioning with a song. After Meg realizes she ruined Christmas with her suggestion for the mayor to sell the forest to developers, the town is somehow able to raise enough money to rebuy the entire massive plot in a single night (including from the landowner, who could potentially have stopped the sale). A promise to Teddy Jr. near the end of the film that they would open presents the next day suggests that that “next day” is Christmas, yet that gets glossed over in favor of the pageant, bringing the timeline into question.

A Snow Globe Christmas does have slightly higher production values than the average The Asylum release, but the town that Meg gets transported to isn’t very convincing as a snow globe world. It looks and feels too much like a real town and, on top of everything else, every resident is an analogue for someone in the real world, which lends an odd The Wizard of Oz flavor to the events. Add completely forgettable music to the mix and there isn’t really much that can save this film, as the decent acting from Christina Milian (who also played the lead in Snowglobe) and Donald Faison can only do so much.

If you’re looking for a good Christmas film you can (re-)watch during the holiday season, you won’t find it in A Snow Globe Christmas. There are plenty of other Christmas films you could watch instead, including Snowglobe, which pulls off the core premise far better and more convincingly.