Enola Holmes 3
I feel like this was written by corporate.
Look, I know that Enola Holmes (movies) is all popcorn feminism, and I was prepared for a fun little marriage thing. Instead, they decided to do colonialism, which... is a challenging topic for a popcorn feminist movie.
But they didn't really do a story about colonialism. They did a revolutionary who wanted a free Malta as comedic relief, wtf. They did Moriarty as an angry black woman who's partly... just trying to get a rise out of Sherlock? Like is this a Batman-Joker thing? They did a few throwaway comments. And they did this bizarre plot where the English colonial forces feel guilty about stealing from Afghanistan. Apparently more guilty than the modern English.
They left Mycroft, the only person who might have been actually happy for Enola choosing to get married, out of the movie without any explanation at all, just a crossed out name. (I mean, they showed how time passed. They could have shown a reconciliation.)
The talks about marriage were off putting, and I'm not even someone who like marriage as an institution. The whole argument Sherlock and Enola have about it felt like it was pulled from bad fanfiction. The argument between Enola and Tewkes (I will admit to liking "Earnest" as a name for him, but the last name is shit) was weird.
So. She's late, gets in a carriage in her wedding dress. Along the way, the coachman thinks they're being chased by a bandit. She gets on top of the carriage, losing bits of her wedding dress along the way, and ends up falling off. I mean, okay, movie magic that she wasn't seriously injured but what exactly is the sequence after that? Because... coachman gets to the wedding, says "she fell off the carriage with a bandit chasing us!" at a noble's wedding where the godfather's a Brigadier or something, and honestly, I think the narrative would be the army being mobilized, not everyone returns to the house and whispers "how dare she miss her wedding." People would be fussing over her whether she liked it or not. They'd take it as an omen that the wedding isn't meant to be if they hated her, not whispering about how scandalous it was that she didn't get to the wedding.
The end the movie with Tewkesbury "giving up his title" to shack up with the Holmes daughter in sin after being "married" by Eudoria. His own mom was there, yeah? Holy shit that's unhinged for the upper class in the Victorian era. And where did his title go? Someone who won't be a reformer but gets his seat in the House? Nice, guess Grandma Tewkesbury won in the end.
If they'd really wanted to talk about colonialism, having Mycroft there as a counterbalance to Enola's outrage about the theft could have made for something interesting, but instead we had the poor godfather who felt guilty about it and wasn't told where the gold was because it was so shameful. To the British army. See? Because he's a good colonizer, he feels guilty that he stole things that they would have justified as spoils of war, and it's the Empire's fault they couldn't give it back!
And then there were the flashbacks. It felt like I was back in the 90s when the flashback filler episode was popular. I mean, I guess it wasn't quite that bad, but still, it was weird.
I can forgive the costuming. It was boring, the makeup was weird, but whatever. But I don't know. This was just so disappointing to me, and I probably haven't even really talked about everything I disliked. It was disjointed and I was very disappointed for something I was really looking forward to.
