Netflix has really cranked out the original content this year, and I am behind on all of it. Milly Bobby Brown’s Damsel serves up a pretty basic twist on a fantasy story. I think we all could tell from the first look that it was going to be your basic feminist fairytale, which isn’t inherently bad but it is all in the execution. And if we are being completely honest I don’t really have a lot of faith in Netflix writers. They seem more concerned about simply getting out content than creating and telling stories. But here we go with my actual review of Damsel.
Angela Bassett is in this? Is this what happens to brilliant actors that don’t get the Oscars they deserve, they have to slum it in cop procedurals and Netflix movies? Damn my girl deserves better than this.
The movie opens with our main character getting married off to a prince, because of course it does. So far the concept is wildly unoriginal. Though I will say that as far as visuals go it is better than I expected it to be. And Robin Wright is the queen…the casting is great but I am still not bought in.
This act 1 is really dragging. They wanted to sew some seeds of suspicion, but they didn’t do that very well. Dad came out of the marriage meeting clearly withholding something from his wife, and then the Queen was weird with Elodie’s step mom but there wasn’t any tension built in.
Then comes the “twist”, they married off the prince only to sacrifice the new princess. The real problem here is that this family lore doesn’t make any sense, if you are constantly sacrificing the women of the royal family then it doesn’t take long for there to be no more royal family. Who are these royal men impregnating? How exactly is this line still going? Sorry no, plot holes galore.
Bitch…this chick gets yeeted down a chasm and it takes her another 10 minutes to realize that she is the sacrifice…wow. So I don’t feel bad for stupid people, please don’t ever make your main characters dumb, I will not sympathize with them at all.
And then we just watch her stumble around this cave for an hour…literally three scenes in a row of her falling or almost falling. They couldn’t even vary the dangers that she encounters while she’s down there, apparently it's just really slippery and also there is a dragon.
Really this movie’s biggest problem is that there are plenty of good, well written, emotionally driven self contained stories. If a film is going to have all of it, or most of it take place on an escape then we have to care about our main character. The entire of Desolation of Smaug is pretty much Bilbo escaping the dragon and ya know what, of all the flaws in the Hobbit movies that isn’t one of them. It's actually good and very entertaining to watch. This just isn’t. It's very dry, very boring, and extremely detached. The only emotional thing that happens the whole movie is when Elodie’s father comes looking for her. That said, as we as the audience are not attached to either character it really means a whole lot of nothing.
This movie was a waste of everyone’s time; mine, the cast, anyone else that watched it. It was a really predictable twist on a really basic premise and quite honestly there were about 1000 ways to make it watchable and none of them were executed. I hate it when main characters are dumb, it really makes it unwatchable. The pacing is remarkably bad for a movie that clocks in at under two hours it really drags on. There is a clear act structure but it's so heavy and there is absolutely no emotional drive moving it along.
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Alexandrea Callaghan
Certified nerd, super geek and very proud fangirl.
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Comments (1)
I have to agree, the movie was awful.