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Damsel (2024)
A Dragon Worth Rooting For
In Damsel, we have an earnest, if overblown, fairy tale: girl-meets-boy-wedding-interrupted-by-dragon-shenanigans-and-subsequent-rescue. However, this movie tries to modernize the tale by having the heroine (gasp!) rescue herself. It ought to be at least moderately successful. It just isn't.
The plot is straightforward: a noble father schemes to gain riches for his lands by marrying off his older daughter to a prince, Elodie and her younger sister, Floria, anticipate a wonderful happily-ever-after with stars in their eyes. Unbeknownst to the bride-to-be or her family is the deadly deception they're about to unwittingly jump right into: the prince's mother (an austere and beautiful Robin Wright) intends to scent-mark the young woman as their blood relative through a sort of "blood-brother" ritual, then toss Elodie into a deep, scary cavern occupied by a vengeful mama dragon who demands sacrificial recompense for the unprovoked murder of her three newly-hatched baby dragons long ago.
I can see that this movie, when it was first pitched, looked promising on paper: lots of peril, sequences heavy on the special effects, costumes galore, fraught and breathless terror, strong female lead. There are some good people-roastings, lots of threatening reptilian swooping, and even some entertainingly cute little luminous bug-things that can heal wounds as well as light the heroine's way in the dragon's cave system. The nubile young heroine is pretty and athletic. It's a recipe for success. Somehow, though, the details that make a movie watchable fail to translate.
Millie Bobby Brown does her heroic best with a simplistic script filled with wooden dialogue, She fulfills the part's demanding physical performance with determination. After first gussying her up in rich, historically-indeterminate period finery, the costume and make-up teams streak her with all sorts of filth and grime, concentrating on giving captive Elodie a variety of gnarly open wounds and bloody scrapes. She groans and screams fiercely as she works to escape her unfair fate. Damsel is Brown's movie, and she emotes and climbs and falls and perseveres in a way that earns her a few stars I'm willing to give this not-great film.
While the heroine's struggles give the audience a sense of who she is as a character, the movie's supporting cast falls woefully short of exhibiting any dimension at all. The prince apparently feels a twinge of discomfort when hurling his intended -and later on, her tween sister- into the dragon's lair. He watched his mother the Evil Queen melt in a wall of dragon flames and looks, well, ...chagrined, or perhaps a mite perturbed. He disavows any malice towards Elodie as a sort of a throwaway aside that is so odd and underwhelming I have to wonder what the film's editor was thinking. Angela Bassett is utterly wasted as Elodie's stepmother. She is stabbed in the gut by the queen's henchman, then canters in on a horse and tells her step-daughter that she'll "manage" in the middle of nowhere while Elodie races off on said horse to do more heroic saving-of-the-day.
By this point in the movie, Brown's transformation from wide-eyed innocent to buff ninja-muscled warrior is complete. While underground, she has ripped her elaborate, many-layered wedding costume into a nicely-corseted skin-baring outfit that gives us a Xena Warrior Princess vibe, and used some handy blade off-camera to transform her waist-long hair into a much-more-becoming above-the-shoulder bob.
The dragon, by far the most sympathetic character in the film, has ostensibly murdered a number of young princesses before Elodie drops in, which we know because these women appear in ghost form as well as in piles of mortal remains scattered around the cave and left handy chalk signatures and diagrams. Elodie, we learn, is only number two of the this generation's three royal brides the kingdom is obligated (contractually?) to provide. The dragon's hunger for revenge knows no bounds. She takes out a fair numbers of men during her quest to kill Elodie, and if the scattered armor pieces littered around the rocky surface are any indication, this is a long-term habit.
I felt much worse for the dragon's loss than for Elodie's predicament. There is a lot of stabby-stabby business (including Elodie's midriff getting impaled by a talon and Elodie in return puncturing her foe's eyeball in an explosion of viscous matter) before the two female opponents figure out they were/are both victims, having both been treated abominably, and call truce to go after the actual wickedness poisoning the kingdom. United we prevail, and all that.
I watched the whole movie. That to my mind is worth two stars. I admire Millie Bobby Brown's ambition in headlining her first big film. I give it another two for this fact. But in the end it's a pretty basic example of a movie that could have been infinitely more successful if it had employed better people in the writing, editing, and directing departments. Am I sorry I watched it? No. Can I or would I recommend it? Also no.
Street Ships (2018)
Winsome Ode to the Power of Imagination
The most eloquent, enduring gift a parent can bestow upon his or her child is sparking the child's imagination and then stepping aside, letting the make-believe mesh with the day to day, opening the door to an infinite internal landscape. Street Ships, though just 18 minutes long, illustrates the power of such a gift. The film focuses on a boy and a girl, born in neighboring houses, whose backyard games later burst onto the suburban streets, which become a worthy stand-in for the high seas. The film's narrative manages to inform and gratify while wisely avoiding a preachy or maudlin tone. The score pushes the dramatization over the top, but its grandiose voluptuousness matches the limitless expanses of the child's mental playground, and follows the story where garage construction makes well-cannoned tall ships out of old cars and layered mismatched fabric and clothing becomes mighty sails and eighteenth-century pirate garb.
The short film carries at its heart not just the joy of make-believe, but the deep debt of gratitude the young man, in particular, feels toward his father, who listened and nurtured and supported his son's imagination and, viewers may assume, the lifelong dreams it spurred into reality. We experience the young man's grief at his dad's death, and we are made to feel a part of the grandly scaled reprise of the early street ship battles, a celebration of life and a thank you to the parent whose own imagination made it all possible.