The Princess

 For a change, we are doing a movie today. And oh boy, if I have said there is a  deficit of creativity in the book industry these days, the movie industry is broke. 

For starters, the premise.

When a !!strong-willed!! princess refuses to wed a cruel sociopath, she is😮 kidnapped and 😮 locked in a remote tower. With her scorned, vindictive suitor intent on taking her father's throne, the princess must "protect her family!" and "save the kingdom!".

I just couldn't be bothered to write up a little premise for this film so I just copy-pasted the blurb or prologue from the internet, and slightly edited the grammar.

I cannot put to words the amount of nausea I felt watching the film, but I will give it a try. 

First, let's break up the amount of ranting I have to do into manageable chunks.

The plot. First, the princess lies all chained up. Gets up and staggers around a bit. Upon the entry of two mercenaries, she goes and beats them up. And then proceeds to continuously beat up even more people for the next 45 minutes, getting out of the tower. The only breaks we get are a few 2 minute flashes of the outside world, her past etc.

 And even those are...

a) Noble king makes noble speech about how ruling is all to serve the people to the villain. (Ha! It's barely that way in a democracy.)

b) Villain and evil consort generally being evil

c) Young princess gets spirit warrior advice from her trainer. (We got enough of that in Kung-Fu Panda, thank you very much) 

Next the princess tries to fight her way to her family, with the help of her trainer. And then after that, there is a "plot twist"; and then some drama for a bit. But as you would expect, she comes back stronger than ever and dramatically slays the villain. 

I think the only selling point this film almost had its Warrior Princess thing. Sure there have been warrior princesses before, but here you have extra blood, extra gore, and extra long fight scenes. (It almost felt like a Marvel movie- you stare blankly as the hero battles an impossible number of bad guys, for an impossibly long period of time.) They tried put a more adult twist on a  ridiculously juvenile plot. It didn't make the film any more mature. (Though it did grant it a misleading A rating)

The characters- the princess shows the usual traits expected from a Warrior Princess. Bravery, amazing ability with a sword (There are so many other weapons out there. Spears, maces, nunchucks... just something other than a sword please); out-spoken in the face of injustice; and, of course, the self-blame. The only variant was her penchant for delivering cringe punch lines while beating up the current bad guy. 

Everybody else was- what you would expect and I really need not go into it.

Oh, and finally the feminism bit. The father initially does not agree for the princess to be the heir. But by the end of the film, she has proved herself and the king finally changes his mind and makes her the heir. All stolen straight from the 2019 Aladdin movie. The fact that movies are trying is appreciable, but this kind of lazy effort does more harm than good. It cheapens feminism an and makes the whole thing seem almost laughable. 

Overall 1/5. Stick with books, or collapse into a black hole of misery bemoaning the loss of humanity's last vestiges of creativity.