Damsel
Damsel is a moderately-entertaining movie that’s a fine watch to pass the time on a quiet evening, but could have been much better.
Full disclosure: I’m a connoisseur of the fantasy genre, from being obsessed with the books of Tolkien and Lewis as a kid, to enjoying more recent film outings like the recent House of the Dragon series. I’m prone to like these kinds of movies, but it might also make me more critical because I’m very familiar with the genre and have seen all the ways it can be done well or poorly.
Review
Netflix has put a lot of money and time into their seemingly neverending quest for a Best Picture Oscar. Just this past year, they had hopes pinned on movies like Maestro, May December, Nyad, Rustin, Society of the Snow, and others. But at heart they’re still the OG streaming service and their business model is entirely dependent on getting and keeping subscribers, not chasing awards.
To that end, with Damsel, they’ve turned once again to Millie Bobby Brown, someone who has already proven to be successful in helping to bring eyeballs to their platform (we all know about the juggernaut of Stranger Things, and the Enola Holmes movies have been amongst their most watched in recent years). I’m sure that this will be no exception, and will likely spend at least a couple of weeks on their “Top 10 movies” list. But the question for us, of course, is: is this thing any good? The answer to that is a barely resounding, “It’s alright, but could have been much better.”
Millie Bobby Brown as Elodie, the heroine of our modern fairy-tale.
The movie opens with Bobby Brown’s Elodie chopping wood for the peasants in her homeland which has been racked by famine and (apparently) deforestation. When she and her younger sister get home, they discover that their father and step-mother (the leading lords of this realm, played by Ray Winstone and Angela Bassett respectively) are entertaining a guest in the form of a religiously-garbed woman. She takes one look at Elodie, says, “she’ll do”, and that’s enough to seal the deal on a marriage alliance with a prince from a far-off land.
The whole family travels to this land, complete with lush, green landscape and a massive, shiny castle. Elodie’s sister is enamoured with everything, and Elodie is temporarily charmed by the prince. Unfortunately, all is not as it seems, and Angela Bassett’s character is the first to sound a note of warning after a very cold exchange with Queen Isabelle (played by Robin Wright). This is one of the first examples of something that I wish had been done just a bit better. Bassett’s unease is based entirely on feeling a bit disrespected and looked down on by the queen, rather than her discovery of something connected to the larger, sinister plot at the heart of the story.
Spoilers Ahead
The royal family. Much like many real life royal families, they’re not quite as nice as they first appear.
What’s really going on is the continuation of something that is introduced in a “many centuries ago” scene at the beginning of the movie that showed a king and his men being routed in a battle with a dragon. After the marriage to Elodie and the prince, there is another ceremony where the two are forced to do the old blood-brother thing of cutting their hands and putting them together in order to mix their bloodline (yes, apparently this is enough). Elodie is then immediately thrown off a bridge into a chasm as a form of sacrifice to the dragon.
She manages to survive the fall and that begins a very long sequence of her stumbling around in a series of caves, running from the dragon. During her hours in the caves she discovers that she’s not the first innocent woman to be sacrificed, meets some friendly and useful glow-worms that can heal wounds, and learns from the dragon that it wants to kill her because of the “royal blood” that it can smell on her.
I’ll say this for the movie, at least it made Elodie struggle. None of her escapes from the dragon seem particularly easy, and she gets beat up in the process. Unfortunately, this chunk of the movie goes on for far too long. Part of the problem is that, despite a crudely-drawn map by a previous victim, we have almost no sense of the geography of the caves. The other is that, aside from a few run-ins with the dragon, she’s alone for all of these scenes. That means that her “discoveries” and explanations to the audience require her to speak out loud far too often in obvious and unnatural exposition.
What Elodie discovers is this: the ancient king from the flashback scene killed three of the dragon’s babies just as they were hatched, effectively ending the dragon’s line, and so when the dragon defeated the king it demanded revenge in the form of a sacrifice of three royal princesses every generation. The royal family has been performing the blood swap trick on innocent women for centuries now in order to keep the dragon off their backs.
Elodie’s escape is finally helped by her father, who has changed his mind on handing her over to the queen for a bunch of money, and is back to rescue her. We never see him changing his mind, though, and are I guess just supposed to take it on faith that he’s now suddenly a loving, caring father and forget that he was almost complicit in his daughter’s death. He dies though, allowing Elodie to get away, except that by this time the queen has grown impatient with Elodie’s continued survival, and has kidnapped her sister and thrown her into the caves as well.
In the end, Elodie manages to rescue her sister, and defeat the dragon by, surprisingly, using its own dragon fire against it. It was a curious choice by the movie to have the dragon to be physically susceptible to the very fire that comes from inside its own body but I assume they don’t want us to dwell on that too long. Elodie also finally manages to convince the dragon that she isn’t part of the royal family, cures its wounds with the glow worms and then takes her revenge on the evil royals by leading the dragon to the castle to burn the whole mother-fucking thing down.
This wasn’t a bad movie, for light Netflix entertainment. It just wasn’t particularly good, and could have been so much better. In the end, it was a very simple story that mostly consisted of Elodie running away for most of the movie before finally teaming up with the killer dragon at the end. That this is moderately entertaining is thanks to the efforts of Millie Bobby Brown. She has a definite screen presence, but I think the jury is still out on whether or not she is a “good actress”. Despite some stilted dialogue that probably wasn’t her fault, this performance tilts the balance of probabilities towards her becoming a good actress.
Elodie and the dragon. Just before she defeats it by getting it to splash fire on itself. Not the best choice the movie could have made.
5 Quick Hits
Angela Bassett is an actress capable of great and powerful performances. This was not that. I’m not saying that she was phoning in her performance and just doing it for the paycheck…but I’m not not saying it either.
I didn’t get why the dragon was travelling with them back to their homeland at the end. Sure, they’ve reached an uneasy truce by the end of the story, but it’s still a creature that’s killed tons of people, including scores of innocent young women. I’m not sure that’s really who you want to bring back to your already devastated homeland.
We’re conditioned to dislike the ancient king in the beginning if for no other reason than he’s a terrible leader who gets his men killed for no reason. Telling your men to “hold” while standing in a wide open space and facing down a fire-breathing dragon is just suicide, and really, really stupid.
The effects in this movie weren’t perfect by any means, but for a movie with a reported $70 million budget, they weren’t horrible either. The dragon was mostly believable, and I at least appreciated the fact that they tried to show the fancy castle as a beautiful place during the daylight, instead of concealing everything in darkness and shadow, which would have been much easier.
The overall plot of this movie was very reminiscent of the movie Ready or Not from 2019. In both movies an unsuspecting young woman is marrying into a wealthy family that has made a deal with an evil creature in the past and must sacrifice her right after the wedding. In both cases, she ends up getting the upper hand and destroying her would-be in-laws, right down to burning down their extravagant residences. The main difference is that Ready or Not (a movie I love) had a lot more fun with the premise.
