BEFORE: All right, it's the start of another work week, which means I've got just two shifts at the theater and then 8 days off after that. BUT tomorrow I have to attend some virtual career fair held by the NY Dept. of Labor because that counts as job-hunting. And then on Wednesday morning I have to meet with my Dept. of Labor career counselor in person, which is a two-bus bus ride across Queens, to show her evidence that I HAVE been job-hunting. Jeez, I'd really love to just get a job, because then I could put an end to the job of looking for a job. Which I wouldn't even be doing if my current temp job could hire me as staff, only there are no positions right now, and I'm not sure they'd give me the job even if there was one. Oh, yeah, it's fun being me these days. Well, I have my movies and I'm catching up on reading and logging in comic books, at least. If I don't find a job soon I may have to start selling some of my old comics.
Robin Wright carries over from "Here".
THE PLOT: A dutiful damsel agrees to marry a handsome prince, only to find the royal family has recruited her as a sacrifice to repay an ancient debt.
AFTER: Well, this is what you get for $60 to $70 million in budget these days, but it's a bit unclear how much of that was spent on the dragon and the other effects. Ah, but that's the budget according to IMDB, Wiki says that Netflix spent $145 million producing the film, I wonder what else that figure includes. It's a bit strange that Netflix will spend that much making a movie that they don't sell to another company, they just stream it when it's done and they don't charge their subscribers extra to rent it. I think this means that Netflix is doing REALLY well, they take all the monthly fees and pool them together and they can drop $145 million on making a fantasy film and not care about it, or it means that they're somehow operating at a loss and they're in BIG trouble, because there's no way for them to make back that $145 million they spent on this. Can both things be true?
This is another attempt to take one of those medieval fantasy stories and turn it on its head because, you know, it's the modern age and we write things differently, sisters are doing it for themselves and so forth. Millie Bobby Brown's character doesn't need "saving", if anything she's going to battle the dragon herself, single-handedly, and get her revenge on the people who tried to use her as a human sacrifice in the first place.
I had a job-hunting experience last week where I got both e-mails and texts from a marketing company, who thanked me for my application submission and wanted to see if I was free for an interview on Friday, what time would be good, just let them know. Well, damn, it was good to see that my efforts were starting to pay off, but wait, can you remind me which position this was for? I only applied for like a dozen things last week, and before I spent subway fare going into Manhattan, I wanted to know which job I was in the running for. They said sure, this was the Sales Promotion Assistant position that I responded to. That's when I thought maybe something was up. I would never apply for a sales or a marketing position, because the people in those jobs tend to be incredible weasels, something I would not like to become. And they were being super nice and somewhat aggressive about me coming in for an interview, I got two more texts about coming in on Friday, and then when I didn't respond, they said I could come in Monday, but that would be the last day. Sure...I got the feeling that they'd suddenly find a space for me on Tuesday if I didn't jump at Monday. So, I Googled the company name and I found a Reddit post that said to NOT fall for their scam, they will pretend to interview you and you'll see a lot of people going in and out of a room getting interviewed, but it's a scam, and you'll end up out in the streets handing out flyers trying to get people to change their cell phone plans. Umm, yeah, no thanks, that's not my idea of a good time. I could have just blocked them but I wrote an e-mail back saying "Nice try, but I'm on to your scam, please lose my number, and shame on you while I'm at it." I couldn't just let it go, I needed to burn that bridge.
I mention this because Elodie's family should REALLY have figured something was up in this film, you don't get an offer from a far-off island kingdom to arrange the marriage of your princess daughter from your shitty little famine-plagued territory to their insanely wealthy prince and get a metric ton of gold to boot. If an offer sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Not always, but certainly most of the time. But the whole family of Lord Bayford takes a trip across the ocean to marry off Elodie, and save their little kingdom from poverty and famine. Elodie really digs Prince Henry, too, they seem to be hitting it off, but it's still surprising to me that she didn't spot the scam, I'm only surprised that it wasn't a letter from a Nigerian prince who's suddenly come into a fortune of money and needs a local bank account to deposit it in. I mean, really COME ON, I smelled B.S. from the start here.
The marriage may even be legit, however right after the wedding there's a second ceremony, where the new princess is asked to symbolically throw a gold coin into the chasm where the dragon lives, to represent the princesses who in centuries past were offered up as sacrifices to appease the dragon and save the kingdom of Aurea. Symbolic, sure - anybody who doesn't see that Elodie's about to be thrown into the chasm herself have probably never seen a movie before. I'd love to say there were any surprises here, but there just aren't, not if you're paying attention and have half a brain and can predict where the story might go.
They do try really hard to make this feel original, like while Elodie is learning her way around the dragon's lair (thanks to a map drawn on a stone wall by the princesses who came before her) her father does regret his decision to pimp his daughter out in exchange for gold. Well, that is the way that dowries worked back then, let's be real about that for a minute. But the old guy does have regret, so he comes back to try to defeat the dragon himself and save his daughter. Well, it was nice knowing him.
We'll have to move on to the next very predictable plot point, Elodie is forced to face the dragon herself when escape proves impossible, and then she'll have to either defeat it, or better yet, team up with the dragon to take down the evil royal family that has cast so many young damsel princesses down into the chasm to feed the beast. Yeah, I predicted that turn of events too. The funny thing when you can see all the upcoming plot points in your head, and you know exactly where this story is going to go, then it just feels like it's taking WAY too long to get there. Really this is about 30 minutes of story that gets stretched out into a 110 minute film, so it's almost agonizing when you feel how long everything takes to happen. Sure, every little thing that got introduced turned out to be important in the end, but then the whole affair just seems like it's all by-the-numbers, if you know what I mean.
We maybe haven't seen this exact story before, but come on, we've seen all this before. Movies where dragon's aren't as bad as you might first think have now been around for a long while, like since "Dragonheart" at least. But this dragon is the villain here for the first 3/4 of the movie, so the film really needed to pick a lane, as we all knew the real villains were those deceitful royals.
Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (director of "28 Weeks Later")
Also starring Millie Bobby Brown (last seen in "Enola Holmes 2"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "13"), Angela Bassett (last seen in "Strange Days"), Brooke Carter (last seen in "Venom: The Last Dance"), Nick Robinson (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Milo Twomey, Nicole Joseph (last seen in "Havoc" (2025)), Patrice Naiambana, Ulli Ackermann (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Mens-Sana Tamakloe, Ezra Faroque Khan (last seen in "Doctor Strange"), Tasha Lim (last seen in "Saltburn"), Brogan McFarlane, Sonya Nisa, Esther Odumade, Margherita Ren, Eloise Shephard Taylor, Sofia Shallai, Matt Slack, Manon Stieglitz, Antonio Craveiro and the voice of Shohreh Aghdashloo (last heard in "Ghostbusters: Afterlife")
RATING: 4 out of 10 bio-luminescent leeches
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