T G

The story idea itself, good. Execution, not so much. The CGI was painfully obvious. I remember when fantasy movies like this could be made using real locations, settings, and so forth, practical effects, and it looked real, painful, beautiful. It was obvious how it was edited to cut away from someone not knowing how to sheath a sword for instance - a skill that most people in a movie, director included, would insist on learning in order to lend a sense of realness. I've seen PC games with more realistic settings than in this movie. And quite honestly, the use of the popular actors/actresses in this movie was pointless. They were very underused. Parts of the story troubled me. Elodie finds out she was sold by her father who knew she'd be sacrificed, and instead of anger at her father, she's sad to see him die. We have the role of a stepmother finally being shown as not evil, and she plays such a part in the story that her being a stepmother at all was pointless. Elodie didn't do everything on her own. She STILL needed the help of the ghostly appearances of fallen princesses before her. Not her own know-how. This story had a lot of promise. Female characters woefully underused. It made me think of movies like Legend and Ever After. One shows characters with ingenuity and grit, another shows a smart female character that is multidimensional. This was obviously a Netflix vehicle for Millie. She was not terrible. Just very underwritten. Not to mention the incomparable Angela Bassett and Robin Wright, who might as well have been played by anyone else.