Five Reasons Why ‘A Christmas Prince’ Is Actually Great

Last week, in a bit of viral marketing genius, Netflix tweeted this:

In the process of everyone being creeped out about Netflix cyber-stalking its own customers, the company’s tiny little holiday movie, A Christmas Prince, blew up into something of a sensation.

A Christmas Prince tells the story of Amber Moore, a junior editor at a high-powered magazine in New York, who gets sent to the tiny (European?) country of Aldovia. The country is in crisis because it has been almost a year since the death of its king and the crown prince—a charming fellow named Richard—has been reluctant to ascend to the throne. He has to make his decision by Christmas and Amber is supposed to write a story about it and you’ll never believe it but they fall in love and live happily ever after as king and queen. Oh, right: Spoiler. But don’t blame me—the trailer gave away pretty much everything, too.

People have had a lot of fun at the expense of A Christmas Prince. But they’re wrong. A Christmas Prince is an instant classic. Here’s why.

1) From the opening frame you know you’re in the hands of professionals. Director Alex Zamm is a journeyman filmmaker who has figured out, over the course of a long career, how to do more with less. Take his musical choices: Throughout the film, Zamm uses Christmas carols that are in the public domain so that he could spend his money on things like shooting on location in Romania.

A Christmas Prince isn’t some $100 million Richard Curtis production. It’s a made-for-streaming movie that probably had to go from pencil-and-paper to in-the-can for less than $5 million. So every dollar counts. And another way that Zamm was able to put more money on the screen was by skipping the extensive location scouting and shooting at Romania’s Peles Castle. Which he knew would make a great setting for A Christmas Prince because it’s where the 2011 made-for-TV movie A Princess for Christmas was shot.

Also, Zamm is something of a Christmas specialist. His long list of directorial credits includes: Christmas in Evergreen, Crown for Christmas, A Royal Christmas, Snow, and Jingle All the Way 2.

2) It’s actually hilarious. A Christmas Prince functions as a wonderful piece of satire about print journalism. Amber is in her late-20s and she’s a “junior editor” at a glossy print magazine called Now Beat. It’s unclear what kind of publication Now Beat is (or even whether it’s name is Now Beat or maybe Beat Now), but the approximate mission of the book seems to be simply: “Millennial.”

Anyway, in the opening scene of the film, Amber confronts one of Now Beat’s star writers about a story that she’s editing. His story, she informs him, was supposed to be 300 words and yet he wrote 650 words. He dismisses her by literally waving his hands and says she should just “clean it up.” Amber, incredulous, says that, “It’s not just a clean up. It’s a major rewrite.”

Just to give you a sense of scale about word counts: 300 words is really short. Maybe three real paragraphs of text. So far in this piece you’ve read over 500 words. Would doing a complete re-write of it seem like a heavy lift?

But it gets better! A minute later, Amber’s editor calls her into her office and assigns her the Prince Richard story. She says that she needs Amber to travel to Aldovia to cover . . . a press conference. At the risk of demystifying my profession, let me tell you that no reporter, at any publication, anywhere on the planet, would get the okay to take a transatlantic flight to sit in on a press conference.

Even at the height of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, when magazine journalism was so decadent that writers on assignment were allowed to Fedex their luggage ahead of them so that they wouldn’t have to drag their bags through airports, had Michael Lewis had come to The Tina and asked if he could fly to Europe to sit in on a single press conference, she would have laughed at him.

3) The details. In any cult movie—and A Christmas Prince is bound to become a cult classic—it’s the little things that matter. The credit sequence features a number of B-unit shots of New York in winter. And a shot of Chicago. In which two City of Chicago flags are flying in the foreground.

In Aldovia, at the Christmas Festival, there’s a crowd shot and among the people you can see a large, man-sized figure covered completely in white fur. Is the Abominable Snowman? The Yeti? Who can say.

Christmas Prince is packed with these little nuggets. When the dastardly Countess Sofia (who has her eyes on Prince Richard) appears, she hands him a Christmas ornament and tells him to be careful with it, because it’s delicate. The ornament is in the shape of a heart. In a movie filled with text, Zamm hides little subtextual clues that all is not what it seems.

4) A Christmas Prince is every movie you love. You know that scene in The Sound of Music where Maria is told how the children drove away their last governess by putting a toad in a teacup? In A Christmas Prince the young princess drove away her tutor by putting a mouse in her bed. And the movie is overstuffed with homages to some of the most beloved movies ever made.

There’s a scene echoing Pretty Woman where Amber discovers that the prince likes to quietly play piano by himself. There’s a cousin plotting to usurp, like in Game of Thrones. There’s a royal makeover of the heroine, like in The Princess Diaries. There’s a ball like in Ella Enchanted. At one point, Amber finds herself lost in the woods and menaced by a wolf, like in Beauty and the Beast (and also Frozen). Just about every scene echoes a movie that you probably love.

5) “Pastiche” is another way of saying only the good stuff. When he wrote The Princess Bride, William Goldman (who’s the greatest screenwriter of his generation) had a singular insight: To write a book with only the good parts and all of the boring stuff cut out.

To achieve this effect, Goldman’s book is structured as though it was the translation of a long-lost manuscript from the author “S. Morgenstern.” And so, whenever the story could bog down in exposition or details, Goldman would simply say that a number of pages from the original manuscript had been lost and then skip to the next great scene. The result was a slim novel that read like football game that had been condensed into 10 minutes of all the best highlights. It was a stroke of genius.

At 92 minutes long, A Christmas Prince is almost as economical. There’s no wasted space and it moves from moment to moment. You get the thrill of recognition from The Sound of Music and then, just as you realize that Prince Robert is really just a millennial Capt. Von Trapp, it jumps ahead with its call back to The Princess Diaries.

A Christmas Prince is the Red Zone Channel of holiday-themed princess movies. And it is awesome.