Damsel Review – Millie Bobby Brown, Nick Robinson, Ray Winstone

Here’s my Damsel review which is now streaming on Netflix starring Millie Bobby Brown, Nick Robinson, Ray Winstone, Angela Bassett and Robin Wright.

Check out the trailer for Damsel down below:

And tells the story of a young princess married off to another kingdom only to be used by the royalty as a human sacrifice as part of a blood debt to the dragon and the first king of Aurea.

Damsel. Millie Bobby Brown as Elodie. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix ©2023

I did like a number of things here. For one I like the journey that Elodie has taken to end up where she ends up in. In one segment when she’s thrown into the chasm, she evades the dragon and explore all the while losing all the jewelry symbolizing her slowly discarding her old self and growing into a new one.

Damsel. Millie Bobby Brown as Elodie in Damsel. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix ©2023

The visuals particularly the landscapes were great. Pretty OK design for the dragon too. I wouldn’t say the creature design was super good but it wasn’t super bad. Maybe this was due to the source material or the production company wanting to save a ton of cash on post-prod. I’ll tell you that you may want to play Monster Hunter after getting into this for the sheer “bitin” of fighting a dragon. They did have that cool visual sequence where the dragon torches the entire sky and we’re seeing this magnificent thing unfold from different angles; pretty standard storytelling and movie-making strategy but it worked for me… barely.

The movie was a little bland to be honest but I wouldn’t discard this as useless. Its sort of a big budget Hollywood movie or a popcorn muncher. We don’t have to read deep and don’t expect too much from this.

One thing that annoys me about Damsel and I’m really writing about this on this Damsel review is that it was sort of marketed as a solid action movie with lots of sword fighting but there was barely any. And when those big action fights happen, it was too short to really enjoy at all.

So I would probably reclassify this film as fantasy adventure and not action. They heavily focused on the action sequences when in reality there was none. Still if you squint hard enough you can see that there are still some small good in the movie. It’s got this nice and VERY OBVIOUS twist for the dragon and on the superficial level, they really did manage to tell A story (but not a really good or compelling one) about a damsel who rescues herself and a twisted kingdom with nefarious stuff going on behind their facade.

Oh and I laughed hard at that walking behind the explosion trope in this film. It was supposed to be a cool power moment but it was cringe as hell.

The cast was exceptional but the script didn’t really use their full potential like Robin Wright who plays the queen of Aurea and Angela Bassett who is the stepmother for Elodie and Florian. We did get moments but again its not enough. I’m sure there’s a version that had more meat in it than the finished product.

Verdict: 5/10

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