I'm Alex Shaw. I'm Sharon Shaw. And welcome to School of Movies. Damsel. I have made a match. My prince. We need this. Your people need you. I need you to listen to me now. I don't trust them. They may be royalty, but that doesn't make them good people. Your hand, child. Close your eyes. I've got you. Nope. I'm stopping this trailer right now. That is the Edith Pf song from Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey. The song is called "Him Lamour" and Birds of Prey has one of the most fantastic trailers in living memory. You are not poaching that because this film is worth more than copycatting. What else you got, Netflix? Run from me, darling. No. You better run for your life. Each time I see you, I come to play. Run from me, darling. You better run for your life. Welcome, princess. For generations, it has been our task to protect our people. So tonight, you join a long line of women who have helped to build this kingdom. The price is dear. But so too, the reward. Oh, and there's a dragon as well. I don't know if that was conveyed in the entirely visual trailer. A really good dragon. That's it. Go directly to movie trailer jail. On with the show. This is a commission show for Chris Finnick, or rather we're doing it as a massive thank you to him. Now, it was going to be just an after school club, but I think we've now got enough material for a main event show. So this is a Netflix produced movie directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who helmed 28 weeks later and in Tacto. It came out in 2024 and stems from a screenplay by Dan Mazo, who wrote Wrath of the Titans. I think we actually had to turn that film off. Not even halfway through. I was like, I don't care at all about any of this. It made clash of the Titans. The remake looked good. So not a great screenplay. And he also wrote the screenplay to Fast X. I feel like the best parts of Fast X were improvised by Jason Momoa. But I think he did a really good job here. There's a tightness to this and a focus. And the screenplay itself formed the basis for a novel written by Evelyn Skye, and that was released last year in 2023. Rather like the novelisation of King Kong, the original 1933 film, the fact that this novelisation exists allows me to write a story about King Kong because that's how the Kong licensing now works, because he was in a book first. But also, so did Alan Dean Foster's ghost written adaptation of George Lucas' Star Wars. I wonder if that'll come in useful in years to come. Now, movie novelisations based on early screenplays were a big deal in the 80s and early 90s, I think. Maybe late 70s. Yeah, definitely. They formed a major part of my engagement with cinema in the 80s and early 90s, because I picked up a lot from charity shops and car boot sales and general secondhand acquisition of these. They were often... Aliens lost action here or back to the future, Terminator. Water damaged, battered old novel with... Usually quite thin. Yeah. They're based on a script that's supposed to finish in two and a bit hours. Absolutely. And they were clearly like the cheapest possible churn-out materials that you could get hold of. Rarely written by masters of the craft. Although some of them became masters of the craft by doing them. The guy who did the Terminator 2 adaptation, and I think did the Terminator 1 adaptation as well, really got across levels that were not immediately apparent in the films until we got to see the extended edition. Yeah. But the... All of the stuff about the Terminator learning was excised from the theatrical cut. Yeah. And so it deepened in the novel where he'd had access to the original script. Yeah, because I think it might have been Randall Frakes, because he was working with the original script. He included a lot of that. And they often had the drew struts and style painted poster on the front, because they didn't necessarily have stills from the film to use as the cover when they first came out. Although inevitably there would be future printings that replaced it with pictures of the actors. Yeah, absolutely. Randall Frakes was indeed the author of this 246 page paperback. But I correlate the popularity of novelisations with the expensive standard of VHS cassettes in the 80s and early 90s. Because they were like 25 quid. Oh, way more. You'd pay a lot in the early 80s especially for a video. According to John Pennington, for most of the 1980s, movie studios charged anywhere between $79.95 to $89.95 retail price for most videotapes. But in most cases, consumers wouldn't buy VHS tapes at this price. Instead, retail sales were few and most VHS tapes were sold to independent video rental stores for approximately $55 wholesale. This all changed in 1987 when Paramount Pictures began offering the movie Top Gun for $26.95, which was then the lowest price ever offered for a new VHS tape of a major Hollywood movie. So it was only a year after it came out. Though that is still $75 in 2024 money. What a savings. Own a film in your home. And that was a huge deal back then. But a cheaper way would be to rather than getting something that's electronic with a lot of moving parts and magnetic tape is just a paperback. So those got churned out. And I feel like they died of death when DVD became the dominant standard, because they were very cheap to produce. Yes. And particularly when DVD prices started to get driven down and down and down. Yeah. So to begin with DVDs were quite expensive, but also VHS tapes became very cheap in the late 90s. So it felt like there was no real need for the novelization anymore. If you wanted to see a film, there'd be more of a release schedule of this comes out to rent first and then a few months later, you get the VHS and DVD. Yeah. One thing I did find with films that I read the book first and then saw the movie is I'm engaging with them in such a way as somebody who's really into the fanfic of a particular property. So you're like, you're watching it and thinking, oh, and your brains filling in multiple layers of other people's interpretations of what's going on here. So yeah, Evelyn Sky wrote the novel. And I'm hoping that this indicates a potential comeback. I mean, I seem to remember the Star Wars novelizations actually were quite appreciated. I'm currently reading both The Force Awakens by Alan Dean Foster and The Last Jedi, which is specifically called Expanded Edition, written by Jason Fry, because they flesh out two of my absolute favorite Star Wars films. And that's also what Evelyn's book does. But she also takes it in very unusual directions in terms of, oh, so you're actually going like, this is not what happened in the film. I remember saying to you, it's neat how she's expanded on it. And it feels like this doesn't not happen in the film. It's just it happens off screen. But then there's a point at which the story is kind of terror and we listen to the audiobook ostensibly originally just to get some extra insight, because it on initial inspection, this feels like a film that's very similar to a bunch of other films, especially recently, it's not dissimilar to The Princess with Joey King, the one that was murdered by Disney, who got by as remorse people were watching. That's the film, by the way, the film was murdered by Disney. Joey King was not murdered by Disney. Yeah, sorry, my participle was dangling there and I didn't even know it. They didn't go that far. It's also a little bit similar to Ready Or Not with Samara Weaving. Yes, yeah, I would also say that you can go back as far and draw comparisons with things like Snow White and the Huntsman and Ever After. Obviously, there are differences in terms of the themes that it follows, but the essence of it, you can see the seeds there. And Evelyn herself said that her story is a different telling of a similar tale that they both came from the same wellspring, but they are different stories, and that is accurate by the time you get to the end. And we are going to compare and contrast the two approaches on this show for you. Now, I suspect you folks, the listeners will appreciate either the book or the film, all the more from having heard this show first. So while we will be discussing every event, if you haven't read or seen it yet, why would you read it first, but not see it? Well, I did for all those movies in the 80s. It's not the 80s. It's Netflix and chill time, where the easiest thing in the world is to just go, "Oh, son, Netflix. That one, yeah." But if you haven't seen it yet, then while we will be discussing every event, I think that this perspective will enrich your experience rather than spoil it. And there's a forensics investigative element to this, because there is also an absence of clarity on many issues within both film and book, especially when one seems to contradict the other. So let's chew over those details and see if we can shine some light on this branching story's more shadowy bowels. Okay, so the opening sequence of the film is a mini crusade. You've got all of this king and a bunch of his knights and guards riding towards a mountain going, "For glory, kill the sleigh the beast! For glory!" And you can see there's this dragon flying in the sky around a mountain which makes it look very much like Skyrim. There were a lot of aesthetic similarities and occasionally some musical similarities with Skyrim, which makes it very pleasant and easily easy to digest because you're like, "Okay, so I'm on the same page because this feels like somewhere where I've been." And I noticed that they were riding in formation as a V. I'm like, "I'm reading way too much into this. That V will become important later on, folks." It is a very common riding formation. Yeah, so a king and his guys break into the cave, stand rather stupidly in the middle of it, not expecting the dragon to have some kind of range attack. All of them get burned except for the king and it's like, "Oh my god, what's gonna happen to the king?" And then we cut to our heroine. And for prospective folks, it's actually 800 years later. It doesn't say that, does it? It just says centuries later. Eight of them. Now, Elodie, played by Millie Bobby Brown, the darling of Netflix. She's pretty much got a contract with them for life as she's there to Nero. It seems that way, yes. And luckily, she's really talented and so much of this film rests on her shoulders and she is more than able to bear it. Also, she's named as a producer on this, which suggests to me that she is looking at her long-term career in far more than just I'll be a starlet for as long as they'll let me. Indeed. Well, I mean, everyone else comes to Netflix begging to get picked up. All Millie Bobby Brown has to do is say at the next meeting, "I have this thing I'd like to do." Yeah, slide it across the table. Yes, yes, Miss Brown. Now, she is a tree climber, a woodchopper, a maze maker and a claustrophobe. Both the book and the film kind of go out of their way to illustrate. Oh, look, she's shopping wood. This means she actually has the muscle memory to do some sword shopping, yeah. And the tree climbing was repeated throughout the book to illustrate how she's able to circumnavigate a lot of climby stuff later on. Yeah, she's used to hiking along rocky ground. She's used to extremes of temperature, certainly cold weather. She is resilient. She is intelligent, observational. Yeah, absolutely. Her qualities are repeatedly elucidated upon. It starts off in a very show-not-tell kind of way that I really appreciated, but then about two-thirds of the way through the film and about one-third of the way through the book, I did start to feel a little bit hit over the head with it. You do it too much, it starts to feel a bit defensive. Yeah, we'll get back to that. Just a special blood, put a pin in that there. That's for the audiobook, put a pin in that. You all know how much I love that, folks. Although when I asked about her husband to be, the first thing that she mentions is, "I hope he's kind," which is something that all of those, "Well, I'm a nice guy. Why am I not?" It's not that you're nice, guys. You've got to be kind and you've got to mean it. Yeah, so she already knows he's rich. She's hoping for kindness. Handsome would be nice and her sister's very much Sansa going, "Oh, handsome would be nice." Yeah, but the other thing that Elodie says is well read. Yeah, I mentioned Sansa here because this film, especially when you heard the audiobook and then go back and rewatch it, needed to climb out of Game of Thrones' ass just a little more before like they finally committed it. Yeah. Because there is a lot of Game of Thrones imagery in this, more so than Skyrim, more so than anything else. Like the aesthetic touchstone is Game of Thrones. And to a degree, it seems like a deliberate Game of Thrones do over a condensed pocket version of Game of Thrones. Yeah. How do we make this for not necessarily kids but teenagers and not horrendous? Yeah. Effectively, our heroine has been prepositioned by Joffrey from King's Landing and you're like, "Oh, okay, cool." So they're going to go across and her dad, Ray Winstone, dressed very much like Ned Stark with those furs. It's like they're living in Winterfell and he's like, "Oh, people are poor and having this union will definitely help our prospects and our people." And so, Elodie's kind of being sort of muscled into this like, "Do it for your people." And it becomes apparent that she does care about her people and she's going to do it for them. But she's not very happy with it. In the book, there's been a lot more correspondences of back and forth writing between her and Prince Henry. Yeah, it's a proposal that was initiated quite some time ago. There's a lot of letters back and forth. She kind of... Which is ironic considering the setup in the film is more conducive to that than the setup in the book. Yes, it is. But they have less time. In terms of like film time, not in terms of chronological time within the story. But yeah, one of the things... Yeah, because it would take an ages for her to hold up a letter and go, "Well, he seems all right." Yeah. One of the things that you've pointed out, which I think is extremely accurate, is that she's like all the Stark children kind of conglomerated into one. And then her father is like they took Ned Stark's position and Robert Baratheon's look and went, "Well, they don't need to be one guy." What do you mean he's Robert Baratheon's belly and sense of defeat? Yeah, I mean, the personality I was thinking of more than the belly. Oh, fuck it. I came upon the stuffing myself. Yeah, something like that. But it's neat because also, and this may not mean anything to anyone else, this is Beowulf. So this is an old haggard Beowulf that things didn't really work out with. Yeah, going, "Oh, let's give this old chestnut one more try, shall we?" Yeah, leave the chestnut alone. Yeah. Okay, so it's important to note, Elodie is not a princess. Elodie is the daughter of a lord. Lord Bayford, israe Winstone, and her stepmother, not mother, because of course, it's a princess, so her mom had to die a long, long time ago. We never see hide nor hair of her. But she has a stepmother, Angela Bassett, Lucinda, who's actually really like a great powerful presence in the film, because it's Angela fucking Bassett and has more to do, and you care about her more. She's also got this little sister, Floria, Floria, who represents innocence and something for her to protect. Yeah. And you're like, "Oh, I hope I get married to someone like King Prince Henry." Floria is sort of her, her colours get nailed to the mast very early on in terms of her attitude to the world at large, which you can kind of forgive, because she is only 13. But they, when we're introduced to Elodie chopping wood, it's outlined that because their land is so cold and barren, their people are, well, exactly, and winter seems to have been going on for quite some time. The people are cold and starving, and Elodie is doing her best to try and provide for them. They are literally stripping out their family home of anything that's flammable to give the townsfolk things to burn. And she says to Floria to go and get the curtains from her bedroom, because the drapes are quite thick and will burn quite well. And Floria is like, "Well, do we really have to give them them?" Like the curtains actually serve a purpose, and Elodie, ever practical, is like, "No, people are dying, Flor. Never mind the curtains." Nice. She's a very, very decent person. So when in the film, when she gets in to say, "Hello, father, I've just been chopping wood." She meets the most fucking creepy woman in existence, this sort of red, clothed, sort of, melasand, the red witch from Game of Thrones type. Who we've seen. None woman. Approaching just as Elodie is explaining to Floria that the land is utterly barren, and everybody's skin, and everybody's starving. A golden... A gold-carriage hooves interview, and it's like, "Oh, well, clearly, that's not local." This family build benches out of gold. It's like, you didn't even have to build the bench out. Just put a bit of gold on it. Yeah, the castle. So it's a fancy bench. You don't have to build it out of gold. You tacky motherfuckers. The castle and the trappings and the kingdom, when they finally get there in the film, is framed very much as, "Look how beautiful it is." And yes, there are some elegant trappings that are maybe not entirely necessary, but the emphasis is very much on how awesome it all looks. In the audiobook, it very quickly becomes a case of, "Oh, there's gold on this, there's gold on that." And I'm sat there thinking, "You're doing too much with gold here. You really, really are." But again, it's a movie. They haven't got a huge amount of time. They're using shorthand for a lot of things. Yes, but I think, personally, I think that is something that works in the film's favour, that it is able to use visual setup in a way that the book starts very well with, but then ends up kind of falling under its own weight. Both the film and the book have qualities and weaknesses. Yes. I feel like I could swirl them around and sort of cherry-pick the best bits and turn that into the best version of itself. Absolutely. My editor brain's firing all over the place. Just add in a few of the little accent to my view of the way came up with as well. So, yeah, they're summoned by this terrifying woman. She sort of looks at Elodingo's, "Mm, she will do," and then leaves, and you're like, "Oh, that was fucking Charlotte Rampling from Dune right there. You're lucky she didn't poke you with a pin. This is the pin of doobly-doo. Put your hand in the box. What's in there? Disappointment." So, yeah, they go to this place and Jurassic World seems too good to be true. They're like looking out the window. It's like, "Oh my god, this place is so fantastic." They meet Queen Cersei. Sorry. Robin Wright, the princess bride herself. She could raise her pinky finger to her mouth, like Dr. Evil, to be a little more of a scheming, evil, horrendous harpy. Absolutely. By the way, the presence of Robin Wright does nothing to dispel the beowulf parallels. Mm, good point. She was Queen Walthar. She was indeed. So, she also has this sort of slight world-weary air of, "Oh, the fear fuck would go again." Oh, bloody hell yeah. When she meets Rey Winston, she'll be like, "Sup, sir?" We used to date. "There was a dragon involved." I did not tie those two together, but they were betrothed. They were. So, in the book, Queen Isabelle is a regnant, and I only found out what that particularly means now. It's the difference between being a regent and a reginer or something or other. Effectively, it means I am guarding the throne until my son comes of age and then he gets it. They never emphasise the fact that the reason for this is because her husband is fucking useless. Yeah. Her husband is a wet mop who never says or does anything. In the book, he's outlined as being more like, "This guy's damaged. He's not coming out of his room. He can't talk to people." Something really wrong with this guy. What is never made clear in the film is that she married into this family. Yes. She is not the born queen. That much. I mean, that much is... It's pretty apparent? Yes. It makes her character spicy. She's a fourth wife. Yes. She is indeed. Yeah. But also, you know, she's played by Robin Wright and she's like, getting her teeth into these things. Like, Angela Bassett starts to smell a rat and starts asking around because Beowulf comes out of a room like, "Oh dear, oh dear." And she says, "What?" And he's like, "They have offered me more gold than I can possibly imagine. Oh my goodness." What are you a Triple Agent now? He's like, "No, I was just lied about being a depot." And it's like, "I was also lying about eight and gold because I love gold." "Oh, what a pretty little lie that was. Me eight and gold." He goes, "Yeah. They're in this temple and it's the city of gold." and he's like oh it's finally all we go he's like a boo and a lad and she's like okay so why do you seem really distraught and he's like shut up there's nothing nothing's the problem hey no attention to what's going on behind the curtain also the fact that it's Robin Wright you've kind of poo yeah this is the thing part of your mind is going yeah queen wealth oh queen uh buttica buttica i i remember when robin right was that kind of she's so much worse than humping but then part of your mind is also going yeah but flavour in a 2049 yes it's great i mean she she was fantastic she's never not but don't trust her yeah but in the book she's painted a little more as a guilty survivor and henry is painted more like in this film he much like his father uh wadawick is willies wadawick yeah he is more of a kind of okay yeah i'll go along with what's being handed to me yeah whereas in the book he's like oh i'm gonna do this bloody thing for my country and the queen's a bit more kind of oh the shit we've had to do yeah so you kind of feel a little bit more sorry for her there is a seed planted in the book as well which is not in the film which is that henry is not an oldest son he is a second son he had a brother called jacob uh yeah he has run away yeah we do not talk about jacob we don't talk about jacob jacob has left the building and that is sort of followed upon in the book with something that made me grit my teeth and get very cross can we put a pin in that for later on we will definitely put a pin in it i'll put i have i have enough to remind me that i need to speak about it later but yeah just remember that in the book version there is a brother who left okay so we'll put a pin in special blood an older brother right so like i said lucinda's investigating and kind of let's just ask him saying hey since we're gonna be family you know maybe you just want to talk a bit you know it's a very elegant very nice tasteful wedding ceremonies you're getting set up and you know can just pick your brains on like my husband's freaking out and robin white's like listen we got your daughter we did not want your lip essentially yeah she's like we don't need any more family we don't need any more friends thank you one must know our place and you're made very abundantly aware that this is a woman of color we've bought your daughter yeah fuck off she's is the essence of it robin right symbolizes in this film every rich white republican woman or the equivalent for whatever country colonizing woman who thinks that she can have whatever she wants because she's got money absolutely fine being the potentate of a horrendous system that victimizes every single other woman except her exactly and like doubling down whenever take away their rights i got mine yeah so this is one of the there's there's a lot of visual cues in the film that i really appreciated not least of which was the there is an overarching color theme it's not directly one-to-one there are places where it kind of overlaps slightly but essentially blue equals is safety and red is danger yeah and there are other little visual messages that when you've seen it once and you go back over it you can see how all of these things tie together and that i really appreciate a film that is actively encouraging you to come back and watch it again so that you can see the next layer that's good stop making movies that you intend to be disposable but you want people to forget about the second they've finished it so that they can move on to the next step stop making tv shows that are long-running surprise makers and it's like keep tuning in you'll see who might die next episode you can't sustain surprise for that long you just can't oh more specifically just once you you can only surprise people once yeah and if the story is actually not worth going back through because you're like well i'm gonna i'll watch it again but things actually make less sense now i know the answer to this it's just gonna raise further questions indeed the surprise okay the end of game of thrones and this is why it's so weird that it's been five years since it ended it's been well over 13 years since it began so visually referencing it and kind of using the mechanics of it now in 2024 feels like a throwback i can understand if it's like a revisit let's make a pocket edition that's actually satisfying but the end of game of thrones was very much a flaming bag of dog shit it was a surprise but after you've stamped it out you're like i mean you got me but i probably would have liked something else on my doorstep i don't think any of us are happy with how this turned out so surprise can be such a double edged bag of dog shit yes yes it can yes it can but yeah so the the the color is one thing to look out for but also there are little i'm not going to pick them all apart because that would be a disservice to the people who get to go and observe it for themselves but keep an eye out for things that are happening in costumes particularly the women's costumes yeah the costumers work we're just working over time in terms of this is going to evoke this feeling uh you notice this time um when robin right talks to Angela Bassett she says your father was a rope maker wasn't he in a kind of a dish you are a filthy little mud blood poor person i don't want to talk to you but and Angela Bassett is like yes and she's like proud of her father and you notice she has like rope in her hair yeah just like little little proud of this thing it's included it's like woven into her braids that's beautiful and again it's these little details that that tell you more about character than the dialogue necessarily has time to do and elodie is saved in the end by rope yes she is or that's one of the things that saves yep there's multiple things that she manages to get out alive because of also in the book there is a little girl called chora who appears to have been made up as an extension of the script and chora is being bullied by some of the boys in this what was it called gildiland uh king's landing or rea rea uh the people of a rea live very very well like uh when they when they first came to the island and this is said in the ceremony there was a beast on this island a dragon and it attacked the villages and the truck door comes and then they went to uh slay it but in doing so they uh found themselves in a very difficult position because the dragon was not slayed i thought so and so a bargain had to be struck ayu is the chemical symbol for gold so it is called gold land or gildiland nice gilded land correct very good their benches are very comfy solid gold anyway i mean it's soft but it's not that soft you still need cushions there are a bunch of little boys bullying a girl and they're like we're gonna feed you to the dragon and she's like nah i believe she's alexantria's daughter yes she is chora yeah so chora is defended by milliborbi browns uh elety and takes a shine to her but there's a kind of uh like there's something going on culturally and everyone sort of looking at her in a kind of uh okay this is another one which is not in the film because in the film it really only like that intensifies at the ceremony at a point where milliborbi brown can't go i'm minutin bitter this feels really weird but this is that whole year my family have this ceremony we do a thing after the uh after the wedding just like in ready or not absolutely Angela Bassett picks up up on this nice and early yeah and tries to caution her away from it and then ray windstone comes blossom you know what are you talking about i mean i mean that she promised me so much goud i love goud indeed do we think this is going to end well for ray windstone huh okay so uh they have the ceremony she does talk with the prince for a bit yes and he's like oh you you put a maze on the uh the letter you sent me that that's clever and she's like oh look some horses can we go riding just so that i can kind of like understand who you are a little bit more and she sees happy enough with him but he's kind of sheepish he does say it's love simon by the way yeah he does say at one point who was like gutless turd in that film there we go continuing the tradition um but yeah he does say at one point that his greatest wish is to explore the world and visit other lands and this is elodie's greatest wish i like the film love simon by the way mostly though for simon's friends indeed not for simon who like i completely sympathize with him to begin with but he could he just he takes that thing like oh yeah you want me to sell out all my friends not a problem why have i been cast as king henry oh king henry the not subtle also his names henry yes portrait of a serial husband indeed uh also henry the eighth i believe his fourth wife was the one he would rather have kept and she died it was that uh jane simon yeah yeah and then the sixth wife went into outer space yeah that's the one okay cool i might have them in the wrong order but anyway moving on um so yeah so he's they're having this conversation about oh yeah we'd both like with Anna please who was on our tip of that she was oh no that shit sorry yeah she was the fourth divorced beheaded died yeah this third wife was the one that he wanted to keep but couldn't um so henry is telling elodie that he his dream in life is the same as hers but it does sort of feel like yeah it does sort of feel like no you're a real homebody type someone's told you to say this yeah i feel like i'd have sympathised with him more if he was like constantly expressing to her i'm in a cage i need to get away from this my god yeah and this is the slightly less despicable odious version of him in the book he's worse so anyway yeah core of the little girl yeah maybe you're right maybe that i want to get away from here is legit maybe they've combined the essence of jacob the prince who ran away with henry yeah either way he does not make for a character that you're rooting for no okay so core of the little girl that i mentioned gate crashes the wedding there's like no princess you're in danger and uh millie bobbie brown turns around as well obviously this is not millie bobbie brown this is the book version of her they drag the little girl away and deposit her back with her mother alexandria or alexandra i'm just going to mention them here because they do not make appearances at all it feels like they could have been there but alexandra is a bridefinder or bloodhound they they only have one scene together but remember i told you about the millisandre the really scary woman in the red technically that would be this lady only she wouldn't be scary she'd just be hanging out with the sailors and going to you know find women in distant lands and going yep these are the kind and to find desperate fathers and ladies who are prepared to do things for their people it is worth noting that there is a point where we end up with sort of a traditional and semi-religious ceremony that is overseen by priestesses in red yeah you mean the actual wedding ceremony the after party is a little bit extreme little bit different i don't know that that is being conducted by priestesses in red right everyone's wearing red the fact that everyone's wearing eyes wide shut masks is a bit more of a a giveaway yeah except the priestesses they're like i'm fine with you knowing who i am yeah but the the people who are witnessing the whole event have these creepy gold masks on that should immediately make anybody go piece this is weird yeah it's like uh elodie's like oh you've put all these lovely red flags up just gonna uh just gonna uh slip into something more comfortable it's a horse i agree this is a bunch of bullshit um so yeah kora asks her mum so what what's going on with all of this stuff and her mother gives her a very difficult kind of conversation about like she remembers her time just you know carrying notes back and forth until she eventually grew into someone who was effectively going to find innocent girls uh and she says something along the lines of oh there's no such thing as good and evil it's time you learn that uh childy and there's just there's shades of gray and everyone exists in between and you know some people do good things and some people do bad things or some people do both good things and bad thing and it's like this sounds like you're telling yourself a lot of things to excuse the actually definitely evil shit yeah that you have done okay so we have all seen the good place we all understand that while it is very difficult to live what you might personally consider to be a good life under a fucked up system that is rigged against almost everybody it is there is a significant difference between trying to do your best under that fucked up system and actively participating in reinforcing that system and perpetuates in alexander's case in a very overt way yes like if she quit her job tomorrow they would find it difficult to find someone who had the same level of training and uh nous to her absolutely like they would yeah don't don't get me wrong alexandra if you quit and run away you're not bringing the system down other people will come have to come and support that pillar that you just pulled out yeah but you didn't have to choose to have this involved role in the system exactly and if you really regret your actions that much stop doing them so yeah after a nice outdoor marriage ceremony we go to the eyes wide shut meeting up in the mountains Elodie is dressed for the wedding beforehand in a very kind of oh god handmaids tale yeah so she is she is dressed by a group of made servants who are in full-on handmade guard i mean like the red non-outfit with the white wimple and it just the visual language here is this is a group of women who are coerced into doing something that is not right for them but contributes to the system that's going on. Elodie is being layer of the white wimple yeah uh Elodie is being layered up with uh like a there's a red underdress there's a whale bone corset friend the corsets like uh that's her prop yeah for the film it's it's very skeletal there's rib bone absolutely and this is where the like the costuming becomes really relevant for later on because as these women are coating her in gold like the the outer dress is this gold brocade cage they wrap gold filigree gauntlets around her hand van braces around her wrists they give her this incredibly ornate uh what looks like a gold and jeweled jewel encrusted it's almost like a blade which they kind of insert into the front of the corset it looks like it's to sort of strengthen the the stay on it and keep it firm it's also a dagger and then she gets uh these puffy lace sleeves they're sort of brought on to her as separate pieces rather a bag like yep she gets a gold crown with sharp edges and and like as this strong gold circle it's a tiara yeah it's very sturdy you could definitely use it to hook things yeah perhaps support a human body if it was say climbing yeah absolutely and then there was one more thing and i can't remember what it was it's the Fabuchette egg attached always oh that's it yeah they give her this sort of elegant little filigree gold cage which chora sorry floria opens and there's like a piece of what looks like resin or amber inside it and floria sniffs it and it seems like it's meant to be a scented thing and then they attach that to her waist and we will find later how that comes in useful yes well the uh ceremony also requires that across this stone bridge that is just the pit from mortal combat yep if you ever played the original mortal combat you're like oh i know this place yeah you do not hang out the reptiles down there you don't want to hang out down there and prince henry has to like do it swear that he will in the book uh the marriage vows go and i take do you take this woman for as long as she will live and then do you take this man for as long as you will live and ld's like hang on a minute wording on that's rather specific and uh then robin right gives her a uh an obol uh a big old gold coin to just toss down the well symbolically to make an offering to the dragon that is down there yeah whilst off after having explained that you know that this this dragon had to they had to have a bargain with the thing because they had disturbed its lair and they failed to kill it and so the dragon asked something terrible of them yes so in the film what is outlined is that they the the people who first settled arrayer it's a very rich and fertile land and sort of there's very much a sense of we will do well here excuse me and then but it turned out that there was a dragon and the dragon was was eating and threatening the people of the village and so the king went to deal with the dragon and eventually realized he couldn't overcome it through strength of arms and the dragon suggested a terrible bargain which is you give me your three daughters as a sacrifice and i will leave you alone and let your kingdom thrive say george yes which did you say the other day was an allegory for how we england managed to bring whales under the yoke of uh english a rule yes there is an element of that to it okay hence why whales has a red dragon that's the country whales we do not own whales no indeed it is misleading though because we have a prince of whales but yeah doesn't it's not the prince of whales i know but when i was little i used to think he's is he the prince are we talking about which prince are we now talking about because he's now the king there's always a prince of whales once the existing prince of whales becomes the king the new heir to the throne becomes the prince of whales okay so it's william now is he now the father of whales the king of whales technically he's the king of england and whales the king of england and whales scotland and northern island maybe for a bit we'll hang on to those for as long as we can apparently anyway scotland you do what you got to do so they're standing on this bridge and robin right is sort of telling them this this story about this is how a rea came about and now we throw these coins that have the three princesses inscribed on them as a uh offering uh yeah like a representation of the sacrifice that was once made so the compact continues and the whole way through uh elodie's like yeah this is all symbolic right you know actually gonna throw me over the pit and into this abyss right well she's not really suspecting anything at this point but she is sort of like okay this is strange but okay yeah and then uh the prince has to walk her back across the pit and he amazingly chucks her into the pit where she falls. Who didn't see that car. Elodie she falls screaming like a pig in a war catches herself on some trees but effectively uh almost shatters herself in falling to the bottom there's a lot more springy moss in the book than there is in the cave she lands in in the film yes so she has been offered to the dragon and she's one of three there was actually another girl that she spotted when she was looking out the window on the first afternoon she got here and the sort of the girl wearing a green necklace looks up at her and smiles and gets ushered back in through the curtains and then that night elodie looks out to see that the curtains are just blowing in a completely darkened room uh and this tower across from there and I said get this whole thing done in a weekend because like no there's no point spacing it out and make sure that the two of the brides to be are within talking distance of each other on the in these towers but then the second time we watched it you said no no no that's a vision yeah that's something that isn't happening now that elodie is seeing from the past yeah now this is one i don't think they really emphasized this exact specific particular girl for long enough to make that point yeah in the film it it doesn't get underlined enough in the book this is where one of the major divergences is so the throughout her arrival at arreia and her getting involved in feasting and dressing and and sort of you know being buffed up for for her wedding she drinks a special kind of beer which contains memories which allows you to remember very specifically the night yeah that seems like a bit of a contrivance it's used to explain how she was able to remember her fall into the cave as if it was happening right now because the beer is still affecting her physically and mentally yeah and so that's how she's able to remember with such pinpoint accuracy but that seems you could just have said your your character's got a pretty good memory yeah it's ridiculously reserved because we all know that beer does the opposite of that it makes you not remember the things that are going on around you what you don't remember makes you remember the things that are going on around you trauma which she's experiencing anyway also like there's there's no other magic really mentioned in this film and then suddenly it's like oh yeah this beer's got memories oh well no no the beer's not in the film it's in the book i know but yeah the book has magic as well but in a very kind of suddenly we're drinking beer that has memories in it the book very much has her here's a magic thing because we needed to get through the next scene and we don't mean in a holistic way either it's like the water remembers stuff yeah it's not homeopathy it's psychopathy one of the things that the book has that the film doesn't is elodie is continually seeing girls doing strange things around the the courtyard and the palace that nobody else seems to observe or comment on in the book in the film like you said we get this one instance of the girl coming out onto the balcony and and seeing elodie and waving at her whereas in the book it just seems almost like she's observing things that are happening so they do both go to emphasizing one of the key themes of both book and film which is that going through this incredibly stressful fucked up scenario that has a ridiculously negative effect on the the women who are sacrificed to it and you can read into this just girls who are put up for marriages they don't want to sustain kingdoms they're not interested in yeah the what gets them through this is drips of help and support from the women who have gone before them and there are in in the film it's done very visually in the book it's more explicit because each scene where it happens has to be described but there's like there's Angela Bassett coming in with the okay i'm a bit suspicious about what's going on just have a think about it she brings her information she says directly i don't think this wedding's a good idea absolutely the hand that she was right the handmaidens that dress elodie give her these little this this probably isn't going to save you but here's a little thing that might give you a fighting chance these little scraps they're not enough but they are little scraps of help and support and belief that somebody got a little bit further each time this happened and maybe this time by standing on all of their shoulders i might get a little bit further than that and that reinforcing of the this line of women that stretches back into history is helping you and is is giving you support that you do not have from the people who are immediately around you yeah and remember what i was talking about Cora and her mother around about this time is when Alexandra says to her imagine you are queen and you have to decide whether to let the land fall or just sacrifice three women a year to a dragon but that would help everyone else is that something you understand you would do and the sad thing about Cora is that doesn't really go anywhere am i right like Cora just goes oh i guess it is fine and she's so she just gets this this mentality handed over to her and then we never see her again i don't think it feels like she's a drop thread yeah it is she should have been there going no this is bullshit at the end in the moment the sense that i got from Cora is not that she's like oh oh yeah you're right no that is a better way of doing it but more okay i'm clearly not going to get any help from my mother in terms of challenging this situation but any challenge that she might bring to the situation never comes to any fruition yeah so the this is after she's already crashed the wedding already trying to and this shames Alexandra because she's like wow my kids got more brows balls than me yeah and uh like it was actually straight up standing up to an authority she didn't even understand the evils of there was no such thing as evil but she could just see wrong when it was right in front of her face absolutely and what you just mentioned there is one of the key distinctions between the book version of the story and the film version of the story there are others but one of the absolutely most fundamental this breaks the entire narrative in the film when it is revealed that Elodie is going to get chucked to the dragon what robin right says is we have to do this three times every generation so every new heir to the throne has to marry three girls so that they can be legally and physically because they do a thing where they cut his hand and cut her hand and mix their blood together so that these girls have become of royal blood in spite of the fact that most of them are being pulled from poorer lands and uh peasant i'm pretty sure peasants get thrown into this as well these they don't want to dispose of actual royal girls so they're creating fake royal girls to sacrifice every heir to the throne has to do this three times then you pay off the parents yeah three times three times with every every heir to the throne every generation then the dragon is satisfied for another let's say for argument's sake 25 to 30 years also in the film you don't tell them about what this wedding's actually going to entail until they've come and tasted the opulence the last minute and then you go right this is the actual deal how do you feel about it whereas in the book it's like we just go to people and we're completely honest with them we say this is what's going to happen we're going to throw your daughter to a dragon don't tell her but uh and apparently everyone's okay with this every single pair of set of pounds goes well you know honey they do have lots of money yes and no one goes no way get the fuck out of my place and i'm going to tell everyone else that this is what you're doing okay but remember what i said just a few minutes ago three sacrifices a year for eight hundred years and no one knows about it in the book they have to do this three times a year and they do it with baby princes are married to three girls a year and they have to go through that their entire life and it is heavily implied that Jacob the prince who ran away has been having to go through this since he was little and then one day realized he could not tolerate this anymore and left and then henry had to take over and unfortunately then like your your thing that's really symbolic then gets bogged down with physics and reality and practicalities and cultural unacceptability here's the thing as well this was the thing that really broke it for me was the dragon put this contract in place yeah the dragons words were you give me three a year they've got to be of royal blood it's like okay but you do understand that there aren't that many royal people in the entire world yeah right and the the and the dragons like yeah yeah just keep giving me your your daughters the fully grown adult princesses yeah every single year and that will sate me on the whole yeah which suggests and also the dragon originally made this bargain apropos of nothing the dragon just turns up and and like do they they go and invade because hang on what's the actual instigating scenario here's the problem there are so many layers to know i don't know this i don't know anymore it is in in the book it is never conclusively established what the sequence of events was because there's such a discrepancy between the dragon's memory and the prince the original princess who got thrown over her memory Victoria and the things that elodie is told before truth actually starts to come to life this is what i mean about forensics so i don't know trying to sift through the bullshit as in like deliberately written to obfuscate the actual situation in both the script and the book yeah and the actual sequence of events yeah we're in the book they're throwing girls down there all the time yeah and if part of your point and i do get this if part of your point is when you've been doing something for long enough you that you forget why you're doing it in the first place is completely normal like you're going through the motions of this but you don't know what it was supposed to be in the first place however it's a lot harder to forget when you're doing it three times every year when you're doing it three times every generation there's enough of a gap in between for people's memories to get a little asian and the practice seems to be get it done in a weekend like i said earlier i was reminded of al-qazar in future armor what uh hey al-qazar you left somebody off the guest list al-qazar why you are so late for our wedding and why you have only one eye and oh uh hey sweetie just go back to the castle and wait for me she she's nuts i can morph into a five-eyed alien and i kind of said i'd marry her but i'm really a cyclops and i'm really going to marry you oh yeah then what about this uh yeah yeah this is a bit awkward who's a she who's she who are they go back to the castle sandy and maybe you'd like to need her in her well this is the real me but i can explain we all have needs mine was to make it with five weirdos and have them scrub my five castles i gave you all what you wanted and of course i made a few bucks letting pig watch with a two-way mirror can any of you say you wouldn't have done the exact same thing in my position he's a saint but why did you have all five weddings on the same day hey lady you got a idea what it cost the rent a tux that changes shape all right al-qazar i just have one last question for you what's that if you could change form why didn't you change it in the one place that counts now i understand that you're like we're trying to limit the trauma but because everyone's so cartoonishly evil and malevolent it's like right but you haven't actually killed that many people in this like in within living memory the last time you had to do this was when robin right was a teenager so then you've got these two branches that suddenly go way apart from each other one where it's like we do this once every generation that just about makes sense symbolically you'd still feel like every single one of these girls who goes off to marry the prince and then her family like she never calls she never writes like you could cover that up three times in a lifetime three times in a generation but every fucking year death and childbirth death and childbirth she fell down the stairs oh yeah uh onto some spikes onto a dragon onto a death and childbirth yeah but the body count on this thing is so astronomically high and also like the peasants are out there re-enacting it the boys are bullying girls in that particular regard but the whole nation's keeping a secret not well and all of those families that you then go to and say okay we're gonna kill your daughter if it's three a year how many families gonna be like i'm gonna murder you where you stand messenger like when when they got jeera butler instead of ray windstorm they got kicked down a well so yeah for that reason and several others the book goes completely haywire and seems to start being very silly yeah and we both got quite frustrated by this because they did so much great groundwork the first half of the book is really great in terms of the detail and the character building on led and the more information about her upbringing and one thing that i remember being really cool is that they they say something on the wedding night about how this this layer of the dress represents purity and chastity and led has to kind of hide a little bit of her oh shit behind her hand because she's she's already lost her virginity in a bomb yeah she's 20 she has had lovers several of them yeah including her first time which was with a stable boy several years ago she is fully aware of the whole like sex thing and has no issues with it and i thought you know what that's great in terms of framing your medieval style princess that's really good character development but like we're nearly an hour in now can we talk about the dragon yes little there speak your name hello d exciting what do you want i want what is promised what is old every generation your kind must pay the sense of royalty betrays you it's in your blood now my favorite part the dragon when she finally falls into this pit and starts wandering around in the caves she sprained her ankle the beast that she meets is voiced by shura agdaashlu who might have said repeatedly on this podcast has got one of five most amazing voices in cinema along with morgan freeman and three others so immediately you're like oh okay so i like this because you're a smog feel to it and the dragon's toying with her has absolutely every intention of eating her and like i can smell your royal blood and it's like no and that's that's a bit of henry's blood smooshing around in her hand at this stage and there's a really effective moment in the book which i didn't really appreciate until the second time when i saw it when a bunch of starlings come flying out of a cave on fire and it's a it's terrible they look like fire bats from a Zelda game and then they all start dropping to the floor because they're just burning to death there is a such a cruelty and a rage in this place it's in the film it suffers from a little bit of green screen problem as in you move in the camera back and the person's walking over what is ostensibly a very rocky stony floor but it's actually it's a green screen perhaps they did some of this in the volume i don't know if they did i don't think they did because it feels more like green screen there's that slight displacement the giant hall with loads of these giant pillars very much evoking the doiro delt in maria in the ring dwarven city the volume works best with things that are still and in this we have the birds on fire moving around we have the dragon moving around that all would have had to be done in post so yeah it's a this cruel dragon uh with this matriarchal voice is is playing cat and mouse with her and has no particular rushed interest in eating her immediately because it's once a generation why rush it indeed and i just assume that since the dragon isn't rampaging around the countryside and hasn't for 800 years that she just sleeps in between meals one would assume so that three girls every generation is enough to sustain her yeah but specifically that she does it out of uh a sense of like that something is being appeased again if it's every year it almost becomes like a uh pallet dispenser yeah you know you lose sight of why you were even doing it in the first place 25 years or so is enough time to really gather up your bitterness to enact what is effectively a ritualistic slaughter yeah effectively when you're looking at stories of of keeping dragons at bay by feeding them sacrifices like george in the dragon like the the story of the minotaur where they send their tributes in it it's all about we keep them satisfied and then they don't need to come down into the valley and kill or she cabin in the woods now the dragon's name in the book at the end is calvus and there's a lot of dragon language which was apparently created by the daughter who is a linguist the daughter of the author who speaks very highly of her at the end and there's a whole like grammar section on this dragon language that is composed of existing words that an led in the book is very much like kind of right i'm going to pay attention to what this dragon is saying because the dragon only ever seems to speak in her own tongue and then occasionally translates that for the human's benefit yeah but it's such a huge creature that it doesn't really reckon upon this human as anything that needs to be talked with one-to-one absolutely and it's been again it has already been established that led is really good with languages she spent a lot of her childhood hanging around the harbor of her home town on ophi checking chatting with sailors chatting with sailors listening to sailors swear in various different languages and gradually over time piecing together what the languages mean so she has this knack for hearing sounds and being able to piece together what they mean but she runs through the caves and finds markings on the walls in what she hopes is a safe place and realizes that a lot of other princesses for a day more like princesses for like an hour have come here and suffer the exact same fate as her and written on the walls that they've been here yeah one of them very prominently is victoria who managed to somehow get out in the film in the book victoria was in fact the one who made the bargain in the first place she and her two sisters were the three daughters who were going to be sacrificed so she was sacrificing herself as well as her two sisters yeah and again this is another significant difference between the film and the book in the film it is obvious that the whole thing was set up by this ridiculously corrupt and selfish king yeah and in the film when the dragon says to the people who have come and invaded her lair if you give me your three daughters i will let you have the wealth and and fertility of a rare the king immediately says no so their their people have been on ships for the last four or five years trying desperately to find somewhere that they can settle they have been through hardship they have been through torment they are tired they do not feel like they can go on anymore and victoria steps forward and says hang on a minute let's not dismiss this out of hand our people are knackered i don't want to doom them to have to keep traveling the king is quite willing to do that victoria is not which for a while in the book makes victoria the most interesting character yeah except for the fact ex-et for the fact that in doing this she is not just sacrificing herself she is sacrificing her two sisters as well and even that we could kind of kind of maybe be okay with but there is a point where victoria acknowledges that if the next stage of her plan doesn't work she is dooming generations of women to this fate and her conclusion is let's do it anyway yeah it's a long shot but it might just work yeah but it might not victoria what the fuck get everybody back on the ships get out find somewhere that's semi fertile and doesn't have a dragon in it is a bit like a haunted house movie we're like get the fuck out get the fuck out of here absolutely but i think in the movie it's much more we want to be weird this is really comfortable and it's been so long since that they really don't have any like they're conceptualizing what if a dragon goes mental what that disastrous outcome would be like yeah but they haven't lived through that which so you can kind of forgive victoria's generation to begin with to begin with because they've had to live through dragonfire yeah but i i feel like i would have been much more behind victoria for longer if she hadn't even entertained the idea that her plan might not work she's clever to a point and cunning to a point but then her cleverness and cunning and her compassion all full aside yes yes because she gets into the sunk cost fallacy yes becomes a cautionary tale and she's technically an antagonist of the book even though it's 800 years ago which reminds me of two Disney films that came out in the past six years or so that both hint at something really bad happened a long time ago wish and frozen two yeah frozen two most definitely had some shit that elsa and anna's grandfather did in now deleted stuff but we are going to not talk about that dude look at it yeah just because the two complicate this Disney wanted a feel good film so let's let's take all of that adversity out and all of the you know generational trauma and reparations for things that can never possibly be apologized for and wish had the same sort of thing like yeah chris pines character in that's like oh yeah they burned my village a long time ago and there's something there's something about that but we're not going to talk about it yeah and then now he's hoarding all the wishes and everyone's fine with that and what is hoarding all the wishes and tell don't think about it i'm honest yeah there are things that have happened both historically and in people's individual lives i'm talking in sort of the broad concept of it at this point that cannot ever be fixed or repaired or compensated for but the very least that can be done is to actually speak them and say this is what happened and that's a huge part of what therapeutic interventions are often about is just you can't move on from something until you say that it happened that gives you an opportunity to at least nail it to the ground where you are and move on from it as long as you're covering it up and pretending it never was it's always going to be there so yeah down's all the film may have that just raises further questions angle to it but it does establish its past sins and how those are perpetuated by the current system in a way that is way more incisive than frozen to wish and game of thrones although from the sounds of it house of the dragons way better okay still not watching it apparently people have seen it still haven't seen it but they might turn the lights on season three i don't want to do it yeah i'm gonna do so a lot of the second act and a lot of the third is Ella D running around in this cave trying to find ways out using all of these bits we mentioned before the little faba jay egg on her side she finds she can light it on fire and it's like a little lantern and then she finds a bunch of blue glowy worms from pitch black and that's glowing blue equals safety and she falls asleep having been burned in her legs and and like it's it's gonna fester and then she wakes up and these big blue worms are glowing all over her legs and they appear to have eaten her flesh and she's like oh you disgusting beasts and you said and i was reminded of this too the little mice in the chronicles of narnia biting the ropes on aslan's stone table because then it becomes obvious that now they're trying to help yeah the the glow worms excretions is healing yeah and they they've presumably combined this with the practice of putting maggots on infected wounds because they eat away the flesh that's already died and gives the healthy flesh an opportunity to regenerate in the meantime that's in mad max furiosa yes it is sorry furiosa mad max yeah but it's an accident it happens because she's fallen into a pit of dead people yes whereas here the worms are they're doing what these worms do and they're healing i love how willow was like all right so this is there they're eating the dead flesh and what they're doing produces and she they were trying to find the scientific reason for it then eventually they just had to throw the worms and go it's magic fine fuck it but led figures out that she can take uh she's she's made a like a lantern out of the puffy sleeve of her dress and stuffing it with some of these glow worms like they did in pitch black with the bottles absolutely and uh they've drawn maps on the wall in the book the previous women who've been down there before her not the glow worms yes no not them although they could they could highlight certain sections they could yeah just little this glows in the dark go this way um in the book there is a lot more to do with blood because what we start seeing in this safe cave is a whole load of these princesses they all seem to be there with elety just sort of like rocking to keep themselves sane in their last few pitiful moments or drawing on the walls or trying to tend to their wounds and they're all there very much immediate and it's not really like a jump scare ghost thing this is the foundation there is a lot of what feels like the stone tape which is a ghost story by Andrew Neil that almost defies the definition of ghost and and says no it's the stone or indeed the house that records these feelings that keeps them that they are stored there that's why houses are haunted and people are stalked by demons they're two completely different things yeah but in the book elety seems to be able to touch blood and there's like bloody fingerprints thumbprint by every one of these girls and she touches the blood and gets their memories yeah in the book she also got some of henry's memories when she touches him and it feels like this seems like a mutant power that would have surfaced at some point before you started doing all of this yeah so there's this unless it's the memory bit like if she just drank a special concoction that no one that you're supposed to like that becomes part if the handmaidens had given her a draft that's not technically supposed to be part of the ceremony but a smart lady worked it out over the years and was like this might help you survive yeah and that's why she's getting all of these flashes but what it actually comes down to in the book is that the I may be remembering this wrong and I apologize if I'm if I am but it really annoyed me when I thought I heard it which is that because royal blood is more potent than other blood it's more special yeah it's just because royal people are just better than having become princesses they've got more medichlorians Sharon the girls are able to leave imprints of their own memories because they're royalty and royalty are divine if I was reading the paper book at this point I would have luzzed it across the room it just it seems so out of step with the first half of the book which is all about setting up a here are all the reasons why elledy has all of she has everything she needs already and here is the reason why all of these layers of women are giving her additional support and help to carry her through and that's what it's about and then all of a sudden there's this massive pivot and oh no it's the blood and this was definitely the writers of the book's decision like she's like I am going to expand on this point and this is her philosophy because otherwise she wouldn't have put that in there she'd have changed it because she'd have gone that's really problematic in the film royalty are an infection they are something that actually parasitically feeds off everyone else they're inviting girls to become fodder for their churning grist gold mill yeah so you can see why we'd prefer that version yeah in the book royalty have superpowers I mean they she doesn't let them off there's still an essence of but what they're doing is bad ah but there's also that hazy there's no such thing as bad people because alexandra a character created to kind of give this argument yeah what the what they're doing isn't really no no no no no no stop three sacrifices a year yeah yeah but it's just we think about for the greater good it's a good shot it and they wear the masks as well yes they do it's always the same fuck it burn that shit down mmm yep starting to understand the uh end of um not understand I'm starting to sympathize more with the decision made at the end of uh cabinet in the woods yeah I'm always bothered me for years since I saw it because they don't have enough information indeed I am not saying by the way that the greater good the greater good is not something that should be considered but you you you can't also let go of the smaller good if you let go of the smaller good you're not working for the greater good anymore because the smaller evils add up until they swamp the greater good when abigail steps in front of the people of green hollow she wants them to not die not to protect them she roars back at them that they're rapists and murderers to protect the soul of the person ordering the firing squad to protect the way we live from this point onwards yeah if we decide to just kill everyone who gets in our way we become tyrants we sacrifice our soul every single time yeah there has to be another way than just a massacre so that's why you know when I get told oh you know we're all doing it for the great thing for the good of the people I'm just like nope and I love the fact that the film also seems to take that tact and and be like nope this is tyranny and it's most clear it's all going down man yeah this is not freedom for gilderland this is fear all right i know i'm just gonna keep calling it gilderland it's like when you call someone's ex-boyfriend or whatever or when you go oh your daughter Eloise elegy that's what i said no you didn't yeah that's uh that's uh something that uh queen buttercup kind of gets her foot in the mouth on right so victoria in the film is not the first in the book victoria's seems to be much more of a recent girl sacrifice to this and actually did try to climb out her tiara is at the bottom of a very tall crystal peak no crystal crevice yeah elegy has to climb through the descent to get to the dark knight rises pit when she gets to the top it's just it's the like oh shit there's no bridge or anything of uh temple of doom but rather than trying to climb up or out she just goes back into the cave to find some other way around ray windstone her dad finally turns up here in the book he does as well and always knew she was going to be sacrificed when they made the first offer when the initial proposal was made he's known since then that this was the out which just raises further questions because what about the fathers who say no get the fuck out of my sight because there's gotta be some jacob there's just gotta be over 800 years 2400 girls and it's noted that the ones in who got into the caves in the book not just all of them most or most of them got there it's the top five percent yeah everyone else just just died yeah and at that point the in fact the use of the term five percent i think might have irritated me even more because they got the special blood i'm like well no no not even that now i'm like okay you're looking at this as like an evolutionary thing you're reducing this to numbers yeah let's not do that please i said joa buttler but i didn't necessarily say we should go down the road of eugenics let's remember the dead people tell me about the dead we're really underplaying the the dragon as a presence in this the dragon the caveis is everywhere like those little booming voice of the now run she's just really chewing this character up i love her in the film you then get a reveal when ray windstone turns up which is quite a confusing way of juxtaposing it because you're comparing it with the bit at the beginning with that king where it turns out that they got into the cave they found three eggs that were just hatching with little dragonkin and the king said to me my ring wreaths go over there raise up your swords just like you're stabbing all the hobbits in their beds and just go stab and kill these little baby dragons perform an atrocity for me and they do and it's like you could just have taken those dragons and had yourself fucking flying flamethrower tanks but no not planning ahead and this is something i mentioned earlier just this whole like that this the grotesque tyranny of mary fuck kill can i marry it can i fuck it can i kill it it's going to have total power to do those three things the only other thing that i could possibly entertain is can i eat it so then we get the dragon turns up you get that she made a bargain with the king what you don't get what you really needed and this became incredibly apparent the second time we watched it was you didn't get to see the dragon's grief you did not get to see kavis become a character that we were suddenly totally rooting for just looking down at her eggs looking down at her babies and roaring in grief rage and fury an incalculable level of sorrow that could not be apologized for an atrocity then to have her begin the speech of now we're going to make a bargain you and i because this cannot be punished by simply me killing you i need your children and your children's children to rule the day you ever stepped into my cave we don't really get that we get it alluded to and then she kills ray winstone in the present while he's going please i'm so sorry to his daughter because in this he only found out about her being about to be chucked to her death the day before yeah couple of days the most so he didn't really have time to think about it carefully it was the needs of the many versus the needs of the few and he was trying to make what he considered to be a selfless decision yeah of sacrificing someone he really really cared about for the good of the people thinking she might want that to be here's the thing talk to her say this is what they have said and i love you too much to not tell you you tell me should we do this yeah then suddenly you got this incredibly powerful scene as LED goes okay so i just got to pretend i don't know anything about this and this brings me back to something that hits me time and time again whenever we watch or read or or see something that has this as part of its theme i have no issue with self-sacrifice with stories that are full of people who gave themselves up for the good of others what i take issue with is sacrifice other people for the good of others if i know you're inevitable but that's not really a sacrifice than us if you're putting yourself on the altar that is noble and that i have great respect for i might not always agree with the circumstances but if you're putting yourself up front then fine but immediately sacrifices were like i'll sacrifice a goat we really wanted to eat that goat i'm just going to put it here for you know god to eat yeah and there are many many layers to what those sacrifices have been representative of and what they have meant literally over time and then there's the whole Abraham and his son thing in touch okay in times of scarcity putting a sacrifice out from what little you have is a way of symbolizing whatever little we have we always have a little bit more that we can share and what was sacrificed to the temple or the church or whatever would then get distributed to the poor who had even less than the people who were able to give that sacrifice why don't you start killing your own kids or other people's kids suddenly you're in a blood cult indeed in times of plenty what sacrifice represents is be aware you can't always have everything there will always be something that you need to give up or rather than sacrificing it so that a deity can eat it because the deities have got right that like if you're rich they're wealthy make just give it to the poor like make sure that give sacrifice your stuff for the people who need it yeah it's that tithing it's that share with the community because not everybody has the same thing but we all need to support each other and one day you might be the one on the receiving end of that that particular but yeah sacrificing your children to keep some rampant fire breathing god quiet needs some examination this is different because this is a god who very much turned up and went right cracked its dragon uh bones but again i refer you to the fact that the people who were signing the other end of that contract went and this is fine rather than getting on ships and leaving yeah [Music] Victoria's plan was to poison the dragon in the book in the book not a great plan not in the film Victoria is just a recent girl the latest of a long line of girls she's the one who makes the original bargain yes where the dragon having not been wronged really as i recall when we heard that i was like so they haven't killed its children the wronging comes after and i was like okay so that it doesn't even make sense narratively that she'd make this ridiculous three a year deal with the dragon just for protection in a kind of a nasty business this landing on an island and setting up a kingdom be all full shame if everything was to get burned and this dragoness says yeah give me three of girls and Victoria and her two sisters go into the cave there is a really heart-wrenching scene when you're still on Victoria's side [Music] Elodie the icicles were too high for her to reach though what she needed was a cup but those were in rather short supply down here the mushrooms Elodie hurried back the parts of the cave where she'd seen them sprouting there were two groups of them large red-capped ones and then on the opposite side of the cavern tiny delicate pink ones above the red mushrooms was carved eat above the pretty pink ones no i'm trusting you Elodie said as she picked the biggest of the red mushrooms its cap the size of a chalice she returned to the frozen puddle and set the mushroom on top flipping the cap so its underside could catch water drip drip drip this was going to take a while Elodie's stomach growled i suppose i might as well eat while i wait she said as she returned to the red-capped mushrooms and i really hope that the princess who marked these was a botanist and got the labels right eight centuries ago victoria and her younger sisters Anna and lizavetta huddled together in the icicle cave they looked as bedraggled as they had when they'd been refugees on the sea except now they were prisoners in a dragon's lair dark puffy circles smudged below 12 year old Anna's eyes and 14 year old lizavetta's skin had taken on a one almost translucent quality closer to the color of the icicles than it ought to be they smelled a sweat and tears and old blood soaked into their gowns they were thankful for the source of water but it was cold while they waited for the icicles to drip so they shared their body heat to keep warm these mushrooms taste like sawdust lizavetta said taking a bite out of a red cap it didn't stop you from eating the five previous ones victoria said with a smirk will be at a fond one that's because i'm starving Anna sighed i miss chef's cooking what i wouldn't give for a proper mushroom and time pie right now she said making a face that the red cap and her small hand unlike lizavetta Anna had only nibbled at hers just pretend that's what you're eating victoria said trying to encourage her youngest sister they had been in the caves for five days now and Anna was growing weaker and weaker it was a miracle they had survived to this point and victoria was determined to keep them alive and help them escape Anna dropped her mushroom onto the muddy ground and got up to check on the icicles lizavetta picked up the abandoned red cap and ate it victoria closed her eyes and chewed on her own red cap it was indeed difficult to imagine it was anything other than swore dust flavored fungus she must have dozed off the cold and the lack of food affecting her for she woke with a start to Anna chirping sisters look at what i found they look like tiny fairies and they're delicious she held out a handful of lacy pink mushrooms that indeed resembled small pixies in gauzy dresses oh can i try them lizavetta asked leaning in to pluck a few from Anna's palm no victoria leapt to her feet and swatted the fairy mushrooms from her sisters those are faze bait the highly poisonous oh god Anna how much did you eat her face went ghostly pale not much how much is not much victoria grabbed her already frail sister by the shoulders and shook her how much is not much she shouted I don't know Anna said beginning to cry I was so hungry and they tasted like candy and I I you what I I can't you can't what lizavetta yelled stomping the fazed bait into the ground as if no longer seeing them could make the ones in their little sister's belly disappear I can't breathe Anna clawed at her throat her face began to turn purple victoria spun around looking for anything that could help the girl she'd known since the moment she was born the girl who danced before she could walk the girl who when she played dress up had always wanted to pretend she was victoria a harsh gurgling sound came from Anna's mouth tears streamed down her purple face as she fell to her knees help her lizavetta cried but there was nothing here in the caves to save Anna even out there in the world that still existed beyond this dragon's hell there was no antidote for fazed bait all victoria could do was gather her baby sister in her arms and hold her while she died I'm sorry victoria said choking on her fear her anger her guilt this is my fault I shouldn't have brought you here I should have come alone Anna's eyes bulged she clutched victoria's hand tight don't go lizavetta sobbed I love you victoria whispered I will never forget you no lizavetta screamed Anna convulsed and closed her eyes her body stilled and then there was no sound in the cave except the icicles steady drip drip drip [Music] [Music] it's so it's one of the most powerful moments in the book would have actually made for a fantastic moment in the film because there's a lot of LED running around and screaming in the dark and the cave and it's like especially when it gets near the final confrontations you're like well we've done this you're just iterating on a theme here there's a specific bit which I'll mention made less powerful when they could have made it more so but victoria has brought an incredibly potent deadly poison with her she will drink the poison get eaten by the dragon and rid the land of it that's a self-sacrifice absolutely and like I said if that had been her plan and she'd never entertained the idea that that plan might go awry and if it hadn't involved her dragging her sisters down there with her then I would have been a lot more behind victoria it makes her more a muddied character rather than just an unbelievably pure one however the plan goes awry and in the book LED ends up seeing through the eyes of a dragon as there are two on the side of a river both suffering greatly and in pain the mother ate almost all of victoria and a child dragon ate just the arm and the mother is babbling and delirious and very close to death and the child is very much weakened and in the book the child is calvus the child is shura egg dash loo and the mother dying is her trauma as opposed to the other way round she then keeps her own eggs which fail to hatch and represent her failure as a dragon seemingly the poison has actually messed up her ability to reproduce yes she keeps them under gold she's laid egg after egg after egg after egg and none of them have hatched live young yeah so you've got this idea of this frightened dragon in a cave being fed three girls a year and always feeling like a total failure so much more texture given to this dragon and again if we implemented that into the film we already care about her that like specifically it could be like one finally hatches and then the king comes along and and wrecks it like maybe this happened halfway through and we took for granted that it happened at the beginning or something the problem is the mother dragon who ends up sort of babbling this that and the other is the one who makes the deal which happens before she dies calvus never goes i am altering the deal pray i don't alter it any further at all she just sort of accepts that this is the way of things this is the way this is the way this is the way this is the way this is the way we're brooklyn add this is the way jotty she's also waiting for a prophesied chosen one to come and save the day and here we go again with the special blood because what what calvus's mother said before she finally shows off the dragon is not knowing that this is the case and being half dead from poison she says you won't be able to have any this is this is the end of the line of dragons there will be no more until one day will come an incredibly strong princess the one who survives the one who gets through the gauntlet that you my dear are going to set up for them heavily implied although not actually said a girl which is why she toys with them and gives them uh fighting chance each time to get around and about the cave absolutely see testing all of them to see if one of them is the one who lives indeed a woman will live and the blood of that woman will regenerate the line of dragons right so until then you've just got to keep killing all of these girls they throw to you and if they die well they weren't special enough anyway so it doesn't really matter yeah something about the older brother or did you already say that that they combine the two so when ray Winston comes down and says i thought i could go through with this but i really can't it's suicide by dragon at this point he's just running at the dra he had four henchmen originally and it's like he's just running at this thing to die so that he doesn't have to live with the guilt of having thrown his daughter but his family still get the golden his people still get the more gold than he can possibly imagine apparently so yeah but him and all his men get killed but he says to ellodie we left these ropes for you if you can find that you can climb out and ellodie manages to free herself of the cavern and then encounters her stepmother yeah who has been stabbed because her sister has now been thrown to the dragon by a robin right yeah in the in the that that happens in the film in the book there is an extended scene whereby they like kind of feels like core should have turned up at this point it does doesn't it uh so floria has been taken and they're going to use her as bait to bring ellodie back into the cave so this is in the book as in sorry the queen is going to use floria as bait to bring ellodie back into the cave so that the dragon can eat ellodie who is the one that they really want to give to her they don't want to feed floria to the dragon at this point they are just using her as the cheese to get ellodie to come back you're the cheese then he's set up and this was the bit that would have made me lus the paper back across the line if it's been a bit i like that we're seeding lus a school phrase from the 80s in england to americans love something it means yeet it means to yeet that book it is put to ellodie that there is a ship in harbor it's the it's the ship from her homeland and that at this point they could just run they could just accept the fact that floria is is is done for is doomed and we could just get away with the money with not necessarily with the money just get away with the light just but just this is horrendous and we should say to the people of aria uh that we will take you with us if you don't want to be here anymore and you're going to look at me blindly again because that's what you did the first time i brought this up when we discussed it the ship is called the dia melas blank okay so the ones who walk away from omelas is the story about the island or the the world that is a utopia and has at the center of it a child who has to suffer greatly in order that this land can be third time that star trek episode it is that star trek episode and that was when we discussed it last time yep so essentially what the ship is there for is to represent to represent you can read wash your hands of this responsibility and let the system perpetuate absolutely but the fact that the ship is called the dia melas means that any subtlety in this scenario and you've already seeded jacob couldn't bear it so he left oh my son dia melas yeah and that adds this layer that frustrates me about that story lamp shading which is that it's used whether this was the original intention of the original writer or not i don't know but it is used as a but the argument is more complicated than that no it's not leave but don't you see that there are there are all these benefits that that we have to take into consideration no you don't leave and one of the reasons i get out of the haunted house one of the reasons i actually really liked the star trek episode is because pike was like no it's not leave this is unacceptable on every level and so at this point this is what i'm screaming at the story that's where your fight or flight went mine was this is all got to come down and i'm but i would be the one to try to tear it down indeed okay so get on the ship leave but tyros from the ship to the castle and as the ships are leaving they will pull everything down i want to shout about fittings there's a dragon in this story that's true but it's a dragon that feels solid and real and that is designed by patrick to topless who designed the creatures in pitch black that is very true as well as zilla from the 1998 film god zilla i always i always like it when i see his name it's a respect for the craft yeah chronicles are ready yes i know i understand and man of steel those two films seem oddly related yeah but it's like phil tippet you get phil tippet if you want the history of creative model cinema to come with you patrick to topless is a solid creature designer he makes solid creatures so in the film and book it's pretty much the same kind of confrontation here ledi runs back to try and save her sister who is kind of like mostly unconscious or just helpless as the dragon kind of wraps her tail around her and coos to her and like at this stage in the film we already really kind of we care about the dragon we see the wrong that's been done and we've got this cartoon villain played by robin right that we really want to see brought down along with the whole system so ledi runs back in and there's a kind of a fight in this green screen arena type place but it's not really a fight is more of a confrontation ledi is trying to explain to kyvis that they were both duped they were both lied to they have both been victims of one system she holds up her hand to show that it's been slashed so as her sisters every other one of those about a hundred girls you've eaten over the past eight hundred years has had this they were duping us by by infecting our bloodstreams with the royal blood that you could smell that's all you smelled and all of your hopes that there be a strong one who could survive her all effectively unfounded said the strong one who survived but this is a big dramatic showdown this is like they're locking heads together this is the harry and voldemort this is the mccaulian hannah in heat this is the travolta and cage in face-off this is dustin hoffman versus the marathon in marathon man this is andre and his dinner in my dinner with andre oh there is no you've been hoping for the strong one in the film yeah i know because that's a prophecy which isn't in the film and also it's never implied that the dragons are two different dragons mother and daughter but i love the element of femininity that that brings see what i mean about that there's so many good things in the book that i wish were also in the film to give it that extra texture but there's so many daft things in the book that just raised further questions that you wish the author had asked of herself before penning this stuff that both of them are a little bit frustrating but the film's less so because it's very cinematic and is over in two hours but unfortunately what happens here during this it's supposed to be a tense standoff and like she's pointing us all directly at the dragon it will not kill me but it will definitely piss me off the dragon knocks her backwards and breathes fire on her and she's sort of hanging off a ledge and then she falls into some water and it's like don't break this deadlock because then she comes back around again because her sister gets a menace and then faces off with the dragon again it's like yeah but you just relieve the tension and you had millie bobby brown lying down with burns all over her again going oh no and it's like it feels like a flashback to earlier in the film which since she's done a lot of scrabbling around in the dark and caves and crying and screaming and and stabbing things and getting more and more grubby and bloody it starts to kind of blend into itself and this is why you make this a tense standoff and a dialogue scene only because it's far too impaired by the need to make it an action sequence that crosses multiple planes in the end in both the book and the film she's saved by a very carefully placed ramp of rock that when the dragon breathes fire towards her and she dives out the way the ramp kind of slops it back out in a in a u-turn and it gets all you know when you try to wash a spoon in the sink and then the water bounces straight off the spoon and all over your lap yes this is why i did washing up but with a dragon remember folks though this dragon has been in this cave for 800 years she knows every single crevice yeah also it kind of looks like that particular swirl of rock might have been formed by exactly this happening on a previous stage it does look like lava doesn't it and the the dragons fire has a a a liquidious but uh quality that is reminiscent of magma it's like liquid gold since the dragons have gold blood yeah it does sort of feel like there's there's gold relationships between all of those things on fire that's going to destroy things but led having tried to explain this to the dragon when the dragon was in a position of power now is in her position of power because the the dragon has wounded herself and tries to explain it to her and then raises the sword aloft to stab and i went okay so you're going to stab it down in the ground to illustrate that you could have stabbed her what i would really love to see is more throwing the sword away to illustrate your point not stab that could have been your head and then she does that and i'm like you have to understand that you're not actually creating tension when you perform this in a movie all you're doing is get it going through the motions on a thing we've seen a thousand times this is where having the dialogue come in is really important and this being a dramatic conversation instead we should have already invested for a good 20 minutes or so in this dragon emotionally speaking because we needed to see her grief in the past but we kind of get it all here and it's too rushed and too adjacent to various screaming burning and blah blah blah scenes when Elodie then decides right i'm i know what i'm gonna do but she almost decides it as an afterthought because she sees it's there as opposed to this was her plan all along uh she goes and gets some of the blue worms puts them on the dragon's face so that they can heal her which made me think okay does she did she know a that the dragon would hurt itself on the fire why aren't dragons fireproof and b that the blue worms would actually heal the dragon dragons have different physiology to humans because otherwise your plan's bollocks it needed to be a it needed to be observation and if they can heal the dragon the dragon who must have been injured sometimes over the years even just like standing up too fast and bashing her head surely some worms would have gotten onto her and healed her by accident the dragon should be very familiar with the three or four other life forms in that cave yeah and the healing properties thereof but yeah you're right about the whole how did we know that the stuff was going to hurt the dragon the stuff came from inside the dragon exactly why is it that it can burn the outside of the dragon but not the mouth or the stomach or wherever it is that it keeps it yeah she keeps it sorry there's a lot of what it was lucky that this wasn't the case yes which to me is always lazy writing yes see my previous comment about we're going to set up this particular piece of magic just in time for it to be used in the next scene maybe Cora could have told her they're vulnerable to their own fire and then we get a bifurcated ending which is it's pretty much the same in both film and book after having made an accord with the dragon Ella D turns up at the third wedding yes to an Asian lady and like she just sort of stalks in bare feet covered in blood this corset with these sort of rib bones jutting out and this like very determined look in her eyes she's got like she's cut her hair which is gorgeous red hair and really works on Millie Bobby Brown down short like Natasha in Avengers and there's very much a kind of did you forget about me mr do plicity I hate to bulk you in the middle of wedding at which point I said and Robin Wright needs to turn around and go the moment that Ella D shows back up again because again this is the the difficulties of trying to make this all work in a weekend yes if nothing else how are you going to stop the wedding guests from parties a and b from crossing paths with wedding guests from party c because the implications last for ages in royals terms they really do and the implication is that the the uh uh an ophian people have left but they didn't because Ray Winston came back and Lucinda is still there and sorry Angela Bassett is still there which just raises further questions indeed so yeah Ella D does some galloping around in the countryside to get away from the dragon then comes back defeats the dragon but in a kind of a like I could kill you but I'm exercising my ability to be merciful because that's the opposite of the can I kill it eat it or fuck it absolutely it's the actual power of being I will make sure that you live yeah because to destroy something is the ultimate expression of lack of control yes offering healing compromise a negotiation is a recognition that those seem like feminine traits Sharon by the arguments that might have been set up over a binary system over the years which is a false binary anyway and deserves to be poked at it so yeah she's like you need to get out of here to the new bride and she also says you look fantastic does she have it in the book I can't I can't see either says it in the book or the film or both she just sort of compliments the bride and gives her I'm so sorry to do this this guy's a wronging and all the guests don't even get me started on his mother all the guests from here from her land and from all the servants as well all get the fuck out of there leaving only a bunch of royalty and a bunch of hangers on who are like we're gonna stay here because see how this one plays out not well folks I had a massive question about this and this was one of the main things I wrote down in my notes at this point why does everybody not run away now I don't necessarily think it's going to help them because the closing scene of this is the entire castle on fire but are they rooted to the spot through guilt are they stood there thinking yeah we deserve this where are the guards guards sees her shut her up punch her in the face of the metal glove some game of phones this woman I can I can entirely understand I don't want it to happen but I can completely understand why Queen Cersei sorry Isabelle would yell this I can I can see that Queen Isabelle face to face with the dragon would go oh fuck yeah because she's ostensibly in the setup where this happens once a generation she's not had to do this before she knew going into being the fourth wife that this was the setup of one day this is what you're going to have to do and she's bought into it and the idea that this is something that she's steeled herself through her whole life yes the opulence is something I really want I can live with this I can do this now she's in the moment and it's the weekend of the three three marriages and she's actually gone it's a real party weekend we drink a lot of memory beer yeah exactly you'd be wanting to drink the opposite of memory beer oh you want to forget me now yeah um but I can see how the moment of actually facing the the doom she sent these girls to would have her going you know what you got me back to rights here that's fine I accept I made a huge error of judgment and I I yes let's bring this whole thing down I am the latest in a line of women who has conspired with supported sold out my own kind on a long term scene system I recognize that it has to come down and there's a there's a look on her face for a brief moment but it almost seems like this is all the stuff that's flashing through her because Robin writes just such a great actress she is such an amazing actress but I don't understand why everybody else is still stood around they should have just fucked off at the first available opportunity it's for satisfaction yes I know but again this just raises further questions about how this bloodied girl was able to stalk into this wedding yeah but it doesn't matter because then possibly the answer to all of that just spitting out the shells of guards that it was eating yep the dragon bears down over the top of this castle and just gets this royal family square in her sights and this is where I feel like they really wanted to redo Game of Thrones and specifically go back to Daenerys Targaryen and at the point where she destroys the poor people of King's Landing and just mass murders massacre civilians with her dragons and goes all fucking Nazi they were like what if she'd gone you Lannisters have been Tyrants way too long takes a Targaryen Tyrant to recognize one so fuck all of you and there's just a deeply satisfying moment of this royal family looking up and going oh shit we brought this on ourselves and all the people who were waiting around so that they wouldn't you know end up running out on their own personal fortunes were like oh that was a bad decision and then Dragoness soaks them in fucking magma and they couldn't resist just going Game of Thrones huh because as Robin White burns to death in an Indiana Jones style moment it's not quite as gruesome as it might be should be but her crown starts melting into gold and running down her face just like Viserys was Danny's brother when he gets that golden crown you're like yeah I see what you were doing 14 years ago so however in the book Elodie has one more trick up her sleeve literally yeah because she kind of like there was a lot of blue worms involved in her way of salvaging this dragon she had to put them on herself you had to put them on the dragon and this is again why that yeah you like have her sustain fire wounds during the dramatic set two with the dragon but don't let them separate at any point don't make this an action sequence these are just further injuries so that necessitating the healing of both of them somehow their blood ended up getting mingled and Elodie's skin which looks burned on her shoulder then turns into scales and she turns into a mother fucking dragon and everyone who's only seen the film would be now like wait what yep you were I had to wind it back so that you could listen to this scene again so that it was clear what had happened I was like what where did that come from because Elodie is like totally squicked out and grossed out by these these blue glowy bugs and she's terrified of the dragon the whole time and then at the end she becomes another dragon and it's like you wanted to be a dragon all along didn't you no she didn't really you didn't set that up that was like a you didn't expect this it's not a flaming bag of dog shit you didn't think dragons existed until yesterday and the author has the temerity to say it's like she was finally in her own body and it's like this is a trans allegory at the 11th like the 11th second before the end I was told that Miguel adopting the ways of her house tribe the the tigers of the of Durga village did not just being brought in and and becoming part of their world and leaving behind the life he always felt uncomfortable with was not a solid trans allegory because he never really felt betrayed by his own physicality I think he did because he always seemed weak and unprepared to really live in this particular world but it didn't really seem to come across in the world he was in in before that his own body was the problem for me it's more of a trans family or a found family scenario his he was in a very very difficult home situation that he had to be rid of yeah there there is sort of very much that that queer allegory of you found your people and now you get the opportunity and brought to blossom and be yourself but this suddenly coming out of nowhere with no preparation no setup and no sort of tipping off that Elodie was magic because she had dragon blood and that that happens to be why she's special it felt it was a what the fuck moment and at the same time I wasn't angry I was like that's a turn up for the books and kind of cool and then she and she's actually an incredible Hulk dragon she can switch back and forth from human to dragon oh does she at will I miss that bit oh no it's made abundantly clear okay this is not a bittersweet ending they get to go home with all the riches and the dragon and the dragon's pregnant now and I'm like tell me how this lesbian dragon relationship can produce dragon babies that's really fucking cool well I'd much rather have the whole of act 3 be all about this like the what then happens there is no suggestion at any point that there are male dragons I think the dragons reproduced by path and a genesis and it was just the poison that was preventing Kai's and the blue worms effectively removed the last of that poison from her system so she's then glowing purple or her scales take on a purple hue to indicate that this is in the book that whenever a dragon is ready to bear young or whenever a dragon is pining overbearing young they become much more the implication is not just that this is because of the healing effect of the glow worms it is the original so god ledi's special blood special blood and again do we have to did we have to do that which again would have really been that makes perfect sense if ledi have been fascinated by the dragon terrified but fascinated from the word go and felt a sense of familiarity and felt a sense of kinship like Miguel with her out the whole time in tiger's eye but apparently if that's not worthy of it then this definitely isn't worthy of it but the the film has ledi does not turn into a dragon it is not even hinted that ledi is going to turn into a dragon but the she when she's gonna get them the game of phones mother of dragons leaving king's landing walking along with a a smile of i pointed the fire in the right direction fuck that system yeah and she in installs Angela Bassett as the leader of an ophi and at the end of game of phones aria gets to go on a boat off to the new world it's kind of like that as well so she was always aria and this is the thing and ledi and she saved sense's life as well yes ledi is going to go off with the dragon and see the world which is what she always wanted to do and again they could have made that they could have reinforced that more with having the dragon feel like i'm trapped in yeah they're giving me these sacrifices so that i won't leave yeah that means i'm stuck i'd really quite like to get off this fucking godforsaken island as well there is a neat part in the book where ledi reflects on maybe that i should proceed as i move forwards now that i'm a dragon hulk doing things for other people but also taking care of myself it's like yeah that's absolutely a thing that should totally have been threaded throughout the entire book and now it just feels like you've just reached this conclusion great cool yes again it's a great conclusion i completely and utterly massive thumbs up it just feels like you added conclusions suddenly that weren't in the original script and you did not do the work to go back and actually pay just just lay down that track so that the end would feel really yes you're slamming everything home in a way that the film didn't manage but the film because it is actually very lean and focused does manage to end itself on in a far less complex ending but in a way that feels less compromised yes and my my issues with the film are all in the kind of in the slightly baggy middle of the second running around in the dark screaming yeah uh the rest of the film around it i think they did a great job it looks fantastic like i said costume design set design the way they work with the colors the the performances it's well shot for the bits that don't feel like green screen really is the scripting is great i might have a few issues with some of the narrative elements but not nearly as many narrative elements of that i had with the book and the book the first half or at least the first third the character introductions and the the dimensionality that it adds to the world and the exploration that you have the space for in a novel that you don't have in a film i really really appreciated so really what it comes down to is that both of these have strong qualities that appealed to me but of the two of them it is the film the time far more likely to go back to it received mixed reviews tim roby of the telegraph the british paper awarded it one star out of five writing ever straight to landfill quality as synonymous with the worst of netflix damsel sums this up by having the tackiness of a plastic wedding came out quite bad reviewer one star so let's end on a fantastic version of ring of fire rather appropriate for the end and see this more as the game of thrones as it should have ended so we hope you've enjoyed this christ and we've got a lot more out of it than we thought we would have we are very glad we actually listened to all of that audiobook and the challenges in adaptation a certain was certainly worth picking over in terms of decisions being made and it helps me understand my own writing just a little better as well so i've been out sure i've been sharing sure and dragon schools is out by by wild design i feel it to a ring of fire i fell into a world ring of fire i went down down in the chance for good in the fire good in the fire the taste of love is sweet when long's like i was mean i fell for you like a child i fell into a world ring of fire went down down down the flames were light the arms was heard that in the fire that in the fire so so so so [BLANK_AUDIO]
