Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown continues to forge her own path as Netflix’s leading lady, choosing vehicles that perfectly match her talent and temperament.
Considering she just turned 20, this is nothing to sneeze at. There’s her fearless work as Eleven in all those seasons of the phenomenally popular Things.
She then achieved her own solo success on the streaming platform in the 2020s Enola Holmes, a lively Victorian mystery in which she played Sherlock Holmes’ sister. A sequel followed in 2022, and a third film is expected.
Now, with A girlstars in a medieval action fantasy — a lot of fun — and proves she can handle a dragon just as well as Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen did on HBO Game of Thrones. (It’s better, actually, when you remember how all that firepower messed with Daenerys’ mind. A hot mess, right? Kind of sad, really.)
Millie Bobby Brown leaves fans confused by loss of accent: ‘She doesn’t sound British at all’
Brown plays Elodie, a girl who lives in a cold, penniless province in what is only described as a “faraway land.”
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Her father and stepmother, Lord and Lady Bayford (Ray Winstone and Angela Bassett), arrange her marriage to the fabulously wealthy royal family of a distant kingdom. Elodie is worried that she is not allowed to choose a husband, but she is also sensible – everyone is hungry and freezing in her forest.
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Millie Bobby Brown and Nick Robinson as newlyweds—who are about to be brutally broken up.
John Wilson / Netflix
So she goes to a really beautiful castle, huge and golden. She and her family are greeted by Queen Isabella (Robin Wright, resplendent in robes, power and snobbery) and her fiance, Prince Henry (Nick Robinson), who looks strangely shy, as if caught in a lie on his Royal Match profile.
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But the stepmother (is that her name?) senses that something is wrong. She has a right. Elodie is really just a ritual sacrifice, a symbol of peace to the local dragon. It is Midsommar with a reptile.
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As soon as the wedding is concluded, she is thrown – with no more tender farewell than if she were a sack of laundry – into a very deep pit. Down below she plunges into the complex of caves, crevices and tunnels that the dragon calls home. The real estate development potential is huge.
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Elodie’s fight against the dragon has a powerful undertone Things’ otherworldly hells. The production design, here and throughout the film, is first-rate.
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Millie Bobby Brown in ‘Damsel’.
John Wilson / Netflix
In terms of size and scale, the dragon – a female – may not be as formidable a beast as you’d like. She’s like a Jabberwocky that can fit into a conference room. But her voice (provided by Shohreh Aghdashloo) is a convincing guttural purr, and – in an oddly beautiful flourish of special effects – she belches whole flocks of burning birds. The dragon, we eventually learn, also has some serious emotional issues to deal with.
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Until then, Elodie was climbing crystal rocks, putting phosphorescent leeches on her wounds, and provoking the queen into uttering the immortal line: “I knew that damned girl was going to be trouble.”
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A girl is on Netflix on Friday.
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Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education