In Netflix’s newly released film “Damsel,” Millie Bobby Brown stars as Elodie, a young princess who trades her hand in marriage to a wealthy foreign prince in order to save her starving kingdom. After thirty minutes of aggressive foreshadowing, she discovers it was all a ruse and is tossed into the local dragon’s cave as a sacrifice to fulfill an age-old curse. She spends the next hour in a dark cave progressively losing more and more clothing and making entirely too much noise as she fights for her life. 

The dialogue? Horrid. The character building? Nonexistent. This movie used literally every single cliché in the fantasy-movie book, and it was fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed the fast-paced action and beautifully executed filming and editing. Who cares if they expect us to believe there is a kingdom with every single biome existing within a fifteen-mile radius? Especially in comparison to the CGI failures of recent blockbuster movies, it was lovely to see a fantastically-done dragon and magical landscapes. There is no experience more painful than being fully immersed in a movie when all of the sudden, a poorly animated dragon puppet shows up to kill your favorite characters. “Damsel”’s dragon, voiced by the talented Shohreh Aghdashloo, absolutely steals the show. 

There are some actors that I know well enough that I struggle to separate them from the character’s that they play. Having spent the last few years watching Brown feature in Netflix’s “Stranger Things” series and “Enola” movies, I worry that she has become one of these people for me. While part of the issue might have been the similarity between Elodie, Eleven and Enola, Brown still skillfully embodied the role of a fierce princess who is great at superhumanly surviving long drops onto hard surfaces. 

This subverted fairy tale did not reinvent the wheel, but it did a good job creating a female hero who kicked butt without conforming to masculinity. A trope that “Damsel” did avoid was the evil stepmother trope. I abhor the typical use of this archetypal character to cheaply villainize women, and Angela Bassett performs beautifully as Elodie’s stepmother (even if she is criminally underutilized). If you are a fan of fantasy movies, “Damsel” combines bits and pieces of all your favorite films and spits it right back at you. It’s basically “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Harry Potter,” and “The Hunger Games” with a satisfying “I am all the Jedi” moment from “Star Wars.”

Minor things could have been easily changed to make the movie one million times better. For a storyline with such feminist potential, Brown’s character was disappointingly simplified through unnecessary oversexualization. In the first scene Elodie shows up chopping wood with a full face of glam, which remains immaculate throughout the entire movie. Pieces fall off her dress every five minutes in the dragon’s lair until she’s practically unclothed, and she often pouts or sensually struts instead of displaying what could have been very impactful feminine rage. 

Additionally, I think that the movie should have been advertised differently. The target audience is not well defined- it is much too violent for children but entirely too cheesy for older audiences. With the biggest twist of the movie revealed in the trailer, I spent the first thirty minutes of the movie rolling my eyes and waiting for someone to throw Elodie into a cave. That being said, I was undeniably on the edge of my seat for the rest of the movie. 

To conclude, “Damsel” is a Bechdel test-passing movie that delivered exactly what it promised. With the bonus of online accessibility, this is a movie I could easily watch over and over again for its beautiful cinematography and reliable happy ending.