Damsel (2024)

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is traded in to a far and apparently very prosperous country to marry the local prince in trade for the food and riches that will help her famine-plagued home country survive. Independent and a bit wilful, Elodie isn’t terribly happy about this, her starving subjects only being a thought the script mentions when it remembers them. At least the prince (Nick Robinson) she’s bound to marry seems pleasant enough, while her future stepmother (Robin Wright) is rather on the horrid side, and never acts like you’d act towards a girl you’ll spend a considerable amount of time with in the future.

That’s because this is meant to be a very short marriage, for Elodie is not really meant as a long-term daughter-in-law but as a sacrifice to a dragon. So soon, our heroine finds herself thrown into an abyss by her betrothed and hunted through its murder cave by a sadistic dragon who probably shouldn’t have read all those Thomas Harris novels.

On one hand, I’m all in for a film in which a princess supposed to be sacrificed to a particularly unpleasant kind of political convenience strikes back and wins her independence, and I think parts of the fantasy survivalist middle part of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s movie are rather effective.

On the other hand, I find Damsel’s moral stance when it comes to its dragon main villain either completely unexamined or actively repugnant. Apparently, committing serial killings while gloating sadistically over hunting down young women for centuries, during that course shifting an already shitty culture into an even more shitty form is a-okay and totally excused when said culture – whose living members are generations divorced from the inciting incident – once murdered one’s babies. One wrong apparently makes serial killing innocents perfectly alright, forever. Let’s not even talk about the implied suggestion that, if the victims of the dragon were only really of the bloodline of the royal family of Evilstan, and not just poor nobles married into it to die, murdering them would be any better.

Damsel even plays it as a happy ending when our heroine – after teaming up with the dragon to slaughter the royal family in an act of vengeance that at least hits the actual perpetrators of an evil deed - finishes the dubious tale by taking said serial killing dragoness with her to her homeland, a place that also already suffers from a famine having to feed the fucking monster will probably not help alleviate, even if you’re ignore its murderous and sadistic character.

This makes the ethical stance of most vigilante movies look downright progressive; or at least coherent.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Up to this point, the Monsterverse US kaiju movies have been rather reluctant to fully and openly embrace their chosen genre’s silliness, playing things more or less dramatic, an approach that has resulted in at least one of the best giant monster movies ever made (that would be Kong: Skull Island, for the barbarians among my imaginary readers), but also in the idea that Kyle Chandler looking as if he had very bad case of constipation makes for an engaging human anchor.

Chandler’s still in this movie, but you might miss him if you blink, for the only human character from the last Monsterverse film this one cares about is Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison, which seems to be a fair assessment of the situation. And while Brown’s subplot here doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense, and suggests that Evil Elon Musk (yup, that’s our human villain) has never even heard of the concept of operational security, or just plain security, it does go through a lot of the sort of conspiracy and weirdness human subplots the non-monsters in a kaiju movie are supposed to go through. With a smile on its face and whistling a merry tune.

The other humans of note are Alexander Skarsgård as the rogue geologist version of Fox Mulder – and the way Skarsgård plays it, he knows he’s Mulder – and Rebecca Hall trying to chat with a very huge gorilla with the help of an honest to gosh Kenny. Well, because we now live in 2021, the Kenny’s actually a mute little Inuit girl (Kaylee Hottle), but that’s certainly an improvement over a little Japanese boy in short trousers. Also eventually involved will be a little trip into the Hollow Earth. That old Fortean chestnut is presented through some genuinely beautiful and bizarre effects, and seems like the logical next step (before the alien invasion I hope for in the next film) for the series to take.

So this time around, those pesky humans do get some interesting stuff to take part in again, but Adam Wingard’s (coming off his terrible Death Note thing for Netflix and the dire Blair Witch swinging) film is pretty clear about what’s the main event (see the title of the damn movie) and goes all in for the big damn kaiju action in lovingly staged fights that lay waste to quite a few pretty cities this time around. There’s a wonderful sense of abandon to those fights, comparable to that phase in the Showa era when the films were becoming sillier but were still using that silliness to put their audience – kids at heart, sometimes in body – in a state of awe and wonder and the sort of giddy excitement that can come about when movies show you something that just can’t be seen in real life (cf., why the movies are better than life) – just with a different style of special effects.

Speaking of those, whoever is responsible for the motion capture and animation of Kong here is an absolute genius, providing personality and weight in spades; only in comparison does Godzilla look like a grumpy old lizard.

Three Films Make A Post: Mystery runs in the family

Enola Holmes (2020): I’m really far from the core audience for this one, so take this with a grain of salt, but I do believe that a teen audience could be better served than with this Platonic Ideal of boring competence as directed by Harry Bradbeer. It’s a film as bland as they come, full of bland attempts at being charming, bland emotions, bland characters who’d be happy if they’d be allowed to add half a dimension to the two they have, a bland plot told tediously. Even the feminism is bland with a vaguely unpleasant vibe of – fortunately - blanded down Libertarianism, curiously enough, as is the pointless Fourth Wall breaking, which these days seems to be the lazy scriptwriter’s way out to simply tell the audience stuff their script should put into action.

Poor Millie Bobby Brown seems to be the only one alive in front of the camera in this tragically Watson-less Holmesian universe; Henry Cavill is Holmes interpreted as a clothes rack.

Follow Me aka No Escape (2020): Keeping with the blandness theme, Will Wernick’s film about a Vlogger (again) trying to survive a Russian (yep, it’s the mysterious and evil East again) escape room experience that may just be a little too real, is exactly what you expect following this description. If you don’t see the so-called final plot twist coming from miles away, you’re probably a happier person than I. The rest of the movie consists of bland characters stumbling through one of those boring and bland warehouse sets, solving death traps and puzzles untouched by creativity and excitement, going through exactly the plot motions you’d expect in exactly the obvious way.

It’s suspense filmmaking that’s gotten so formulaic, you better call it unexciting filmmaking.

Red Spirit Lake (1993): Pretty much the absolute opposite to the blandness of the other two films in this entry is this camcorder shot wonder by Cinema of Transgression associated filmmaker Charles Pinion. It’s sleazy and bloody to an amount Herschell Gordon Lewis would have loved, but Lewis’s commercial instincts are replaced by the kind of (very special) arthouse sensibility that likes to pretend to be amateurish to be as subversive as possible, using a lexicon of horror movie tropes as aggressively as it can, editing, shooting and acting roughly on purpose, only to go from some homemade gore effect to moments straight out of abstract experimental cinema, being weird as hell throughout.

After two films so desperate to be for everyone they become too bland to be for anyone, this sort of thing feels even more alive.

In short: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

There are some curious weaknesses to Michael Dougherty’s second Godzilla film that keep it rather behind Legendary’s until now best kaijuverse movie, the grand Kong: Skull Island. Most obviously it repeats the mistake of the first Legendary Godzilla movie and concentrates on the least interesting of its human characters, in this case portrayed by Kyle Chandler giving his sad sack character a particularly whiny note (which sure doesn’t help), while he’s surrounded by a bunch of much more interesting actors involved in much more interesting business (Ken Watanabe! Zhang Ziyi! Bradley Whitford! Vera Farmiga! Millie Bobby Brown! Aisha Hinds!), who all do get their moments to shine but are still not allowed to be a proper ensemble for reasons only known to Dougherty. In other regards, the film is actually much better than the first Godzilla at integrating that pesky human element into the plot.

Now, I could go the way of various mainstream film critics and complain about the mild silliness of that human business, but for an old kaiju hand, the mix of earnest eco monologues, mild action, and big fat McGuffins seems perfectly appropriate to the film, and provides quite a bit of entertainment to the friend of explosions, dimly lit corridors and terribly incompetent security forces too. Plus, while I’m no fan of Chandler’s character or Chandler’s acting here, I do appreciate how the film suggests that both he and his ex-wife have lost their respective marbles in very different ways after the kaiju-induced death of their son, turning both the protagonist and the antagonist of the film into characters who have turned to destructive views and ways of life after contact with something they can barely comprehend. It will need a member of the next generation to teach them better. Which, if you’re not a mainstream movie critic, you just might be able to identify as a couple of the film’s themes.


And, you know, then there’s the actual reason for anyone sane to go into a movie called “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, and that’s enjoying the monster action as well gawking at the way King Gidorah, Rodan and Mothra have been Americanised. And wouldn’t you know it, the monster action is indeed properly great, usually emphasising the sheer size and mass of the creatures, the way they dwarf the human characters not just physically but conceptually. That last element is of course weakened by a modern Hollywood movie’s need to have its human protagonists actually do something that matters, and go through a character arc but that sort of thing is rather inevitable. On the positive side, the film does again and again provide a feeling of sheer awe and wonder at the kaijus that made all of its failings null and void to me while watching, and still looks pretty damn good weeks later.