Damsel (2024) - God, I HATE this movie.
This is one of the most morally bankrupt, logically empty movies to ever disgrace a streaming platform.
Let’s get one thing straight: the dragon's actions are indefensible.
The movie attempts to create sympathy for her because she lost her hatchlings. While that's a tragic backstory, the response to that grief is to spend centuries demanding three innocent daughters every single generation as a sacrifice. They weren't quick deaths - the flashback Elodie had of the women showed how they were brutally killed.
The "dragon was tricked" excuse also falls flat. This is presented as an ancient, telepathic, sentient being. It's hard to believe that for centuries, not one single person managed to explain the situation to her. The victims likely begged and explained they weren't royals, even admitting the "ceremonial trick."
Yet the dragon continued the cycle because she didn't confront the actual royal family responsible. She chose not to listen to her victims, even if they were telling the truth.
Why, after so many centuries, does it take someone like Elodie to get through to her??
You expect me to believe that for hundreds of years, the dragon was too stupid or lazy to realize these innocent girls she was killing weren't royalty?
You expect me to sympathize with monster who, instead of going straight to the castle and targeting her children's killers (maybe burning it down), she hides in a hole and demands three daughters for every generation of the royal family?
Instead of finding ways to cope with her grief and go after the actual villains who hurt her?
Instead, she becomes the very thing she hates by killing the children of other mothers. That doesn't make her a "misunderstood monster victim." It makes her a petty, sociopathic mass murderer who took her vengeance out by forcing a pact with the King to sacrifice chilfren from the royal bloodline, who then die horrific deaths.
It also insults and desecrates actual motherhood. A character who loses a child should ideally be the last person to inflict that same soul-crushing pain on hundreds of other mothers. Instead of honoring her children, she created a mountain of innocent victims.
And the ending feels completely unearned.
The dragon and Elodie team up and fly off as allies? If someone had attempted to kill me, killed countless other people, killed my father, I would NOT play nice with them, heal them or form an alliance with them.
The filmmakers treat the audience like they're stupid, betting that they'll be too distracted by the high-budget CGI and stunning visuals to notice the shitty story and its glaring logical voids.
They gaslight the viewer into accepting a "feminist" triumph while ignoring that a dragon, who's suppose to be wise and smart, spent three centuries murdering innocent women (yes, those women, regardless of whether they were true royalty or not, had NOTHING to do with the first King's sins).
The writer and director assume we lack the basic intelligence to realize that a grieving mother wouldn't spend 300 years inflicting that same soul-crushing pain on hundreds of other families. The senseless twist at the end where Elodie teams up with the creature that hunted her for sport as she did with the other victims is a slap in the face to viewers.
It insults our emotional memory, expecting us to swallow a narrative of "sisterhood" that's built on a literal mountain of female corpses.
Ultimately, the production treats the audience as vapid consumers who'll prioritize flashy spectacle over moral consistency and basic common sense, using "Girl Power" tropes as a cheap veil for unearned redemption and narrative rot.
It masks a plot about a character who has committed horrific acts without facing consequences. The humans did awful things too, I'm not ignoring that fact. Lord Bayford willingly sold Elodie for gold to be killed by the dragon when he could have sold any other asset he clung to or could've escaped with his family, going into exile.
But he and the royal family suffered the consequences for their atrocities. While sacrificing his daughter shouldn't even have been in the script (she could have been some peasant or servant seized by the royals), the dragon should have died as atonement. She was so goddamn unlikable in her petty vengeance, taunting and playing with her frightened victims before killing them.
The dragon isn't just a monster. She’s a predatory hypocrite. She spent centuries listening to those girls cry and watch them carve their names into the walls in desperation, and she never once stopped to think, "Maybe I'm the villain here."
To have her fly off into the sunset without ever acknowledging that she's the reason those women and Elodie's father are dead in a cave is the height of vile, lazy writing.
She willingly killed more people than what the original King did murdering her children. She took away them away from countless other mothers. That doesn't make her better, it makes her worse.
And I don't buy for one minute her claim that she is the last of her kind. Just because there hasn't been any other dragon in centuries doesn't mean they're not out there.
This dud is hollow, logically inconsistent, and deeply frustrating.
No wonder it went to Netflix's dumping ground of mediocre and shitty original films instead of a wide, theatrical release. The film tried to have it both ways by demonizing a dragon through a Western, Christian lens but suddenly pivoting at the last minute with the modern view of the 'sympathetic monster.' It's a sudden, tonal whiplash that ruins the last half of the film.
Dan Mazeau, you shitty writer, please stay away from the film executives offices. Or better yet, don't write anymore fake "feminist" bullshit scripts. The same goes to you, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Agreeing to change the script at the last minute where the dragon lives because you starting liking the creature.
And Millie Bobby Brown, you're a clueless, huge sellout for producing this trash of a film. You too, Shohreh Aghdashloo, for caring more about a paycheck and working with a hack writer and director instead of walking away from the script, preserving your dignity and appreciation for true art and storytelling integrity.
