There is a common writer’s curse, especially among fantasy writers, called ‘Worldbuilders Syndrome.’ It’s a term for when a writer gets lost in the weeds of creating their world. They think that in order to create a fantasy world, they need to have fully fleshed out languages and religions and creatures and histories and trade routes and… you get my point. Brandon Sanderson has a great lecture that digs into why this doesn’t have to be the case. Creating a fun and interesting fantasy world that feels real is like walking a tightrope. You don’t need to do as much work as Tolkien…
But you do need to do some work, which the creators of Damsel clearly didn’t do. As a huge fantasy reader (and writer!) I can only weep at what a dismal showing this is for the genre. I understand that the narrative of Damsel is attempting to play off fairy tales, but the sheer lack of effort that went into fleshing out this world is depressing. I’m not diluting things at all by simply telling you that this is a world where there’s a dragon living in a mountain, a nation that can no longer grow food (for some unexplained reason), and a nation ruled by an evil queen who is… bad. I could maybe accept something this simple from a children’s story, but this isn’t that.
Let’s back up a step. Damsel follows the story of Elodie, daughter of a struggling lord, who receives a marriage proposal from a prince in a far-off land. Her family travels to the land, the prince and Elodie seemingly fall in love over the course of an afternoon, then they’re married! Hooray! I belabour all this because the film does, too. It takes over half an hour for this less-than-two-hour film to get started (thirty-five minutes to be precise). It’s such an agonising, drawn-out first act that manages to do absolutely nothing interesting in setting the stage. Eventually, though, we get to the plot-hole-ridden meat of the movie—Elodie is actually a sacrifice for the dragon that lives in a nearby mountain, so she’s thrown into a chasm (which somehow doesn’t kill her) and now has to figure out a way to survive in the mountain. The fact that I knew this was the premise of the movie was the only thing that kept me from completely tuning out of this dreadful first act.
It goes beyond a lack of worldbuilding and good pacing, though. Every single character in Damsel is a bad joke, but we’ll focus on Elodie, played by Millie Bobbie Brown, our titular damsel with all the personality of a cardboard box. There is nothing to root for here. Elodie does not learn or grow or change. While the toll the story takes on her is physical, her ability to survive her ordeals are utterly contrived and meaningless. For example, after receiving a bad burn on her leg, Elodie discovers… drum-roll, please… glowing blue magic slugs that heal wounds if you let them touch your wound! Are these slugs set up, explained, or even commented on in any way? Do I really have to say? Millie Bobbie Brown also unfortunately lacks the gravity or charisma that might make a character with very little interesting to say work. It’s bland all the way down. On a side note, how disappointing is it that this attempt to put a feminist spin on a fairy tale-type story results in such a boring female character? There’s a very ‘girls-get-it-done’ feel to the thing at times. There's no examination of the society that would do this to a young woman, or create a queen so maliciously complicit in the whole thing. It's all so surface-level, which makes a bit more sense when you realise that this was written by the dude who wrote Fast X…
Damsel is such a hollow, empty thing. The talent of some truly incredible actors like Robin Wright and Angela Basset are totally wasted. Every plot beat bashes itself over your head, with Elodie doing that annoying movie thing of speaking aloud to herself even though nobody’s there so that you, the dumb audience member, won’t have to think even for a second. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is the wasted potential. There’s an interesting movie somewhere in here. I couldn’t help but wonder what the team behind, say, The Green Knight could do with this concept. The potential for interesting visuals and for genuinely terrifying moments is all there. Instead, what we got were lifeless, tensionless scenes that constantly invite even the most moderately invested audience member to continually guess what will happen next, if only to mentally fill the time.
The trick to tackling Worldbuilder’s Syndrome, according to Brandon Sanderson, is to treat your world like a hollow iceberg. From the outside looking in, a reader sees the iceberg and thinks that what they’re seeing on the surface is only ten percent of what’s really there—that the writer has done plenty of work behind-the-scenes to make this world feel real, even if those details aren’t pertinent to the story. The twist is that the iceberg is hollow—you make it look like you’ve done the work, without sinking hundreds of hours into a document that will never see the light of day. The same applies to characters. You don’t need to choose a favourite colour for your character. You just need them to feel like a person who would have a favourite colour—or not, if they wouldn’t think about that sort of thing. Generally, in fantasy, you can afford to do less worldbuilding work so long as you still put in the effort to create a compelling main character. Damsel made the unfortunate decision to avoid doing either of these things, but luckily for you, avoiding Damsel isn’t much work at all.
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