Films and Fiction

While browsing Netflix, I came across The Sea Beast. I’d heard about this movie before, and was looking for something animated to watch and the preview looked good, so decided to give it a go, and was surprised and disappointed by it.

The film is a kind of historical fantasy, set in a fictional 18th century, where the sea is filled with giant monsters that prey on ships. To fight them, hunters roam the oceans, killing them and claiming a bounty for every one they take down, keeping the seas open and allowing trade to flow.

The movie opens with an absolutely brilliant scene. You’re flung straight into the action, with the crew of the Inevitable taking on a massive sea beast to save another ship. This is all great stuff; you get to understand the stakes here, most of the main characters are introduced, and it’s very entertaining. I was hooked at this point, and believed that this was a movie that could really be about to do something special.

It’s an interesting world being created here. Maybe it’s not the most original, drawing on all the old pirate tropes, and stealing from stuff like Pirates of the Caribbean, but it’s so compelling, and so are the characters who live in it. Jacob, the main hero, is a dashing monster hunter in the swashbuckler print. He’s an actual hero, sensible, confident, and with one scene aside, not always being taken down with self-referential comedy.

Captain Crow is a great character, too. You can see exactly who and what he is, as an old sailor who’s been hunting beasts all his life. If there’s one thing I’d criticize, it’s that he’s too obsessed with catching ‘Red Bluster’, the creature that took one of his eyes in a previous encounter. Sure, you’d be mad about it, but he constantly puts his life, ship, and crew in danger during his pursuit. If the best had killed his family or taken down his ship once before, it would make it more believable, and raise the stakes a bit.

One character who isn’t as good is Maisie, a little girl who dreams of becoming a monster hunter herself, idolizing them from the stories she’s read of their heroics. She stows away on Crow’s ship, and ends up stranded with Jacob after the Red Bluster attacks. She can be quite irritating, always getting in the way, and seems to know far too much, and be right far too many times, for a girl of her age. I don’t know what it is with animated movies always seeming to have irritating kids, but it’s a bit of a trope. She also quickly changes from wanting to be a hunter to becoming a conservationist once she sees the beast up close. Regardless, I could still have overlooked her if the movie didn’t make more mistakes.

The story is pretty obvious. It turns out the legends were wrong, and the monsters aren’t bad, it’s the humans who provoked them, and Red Bluster actually helps out Jacob and Maisie when they are stranded. It’s an old story, but it works fine, and the problem isn’t in the idea, it’s in the execution. The beasts become heroes very quick, kind of how the Monsterverse did with Kong, and there’s no real attempt to show any nuance or show that maybe the humans have a point.

This is just one small problem, but it’s only the start of the list. Another is world building. All the characters and their lifestyle is fine, but I do feel like there’s a lack of exploration of how dangerous the sea can really be with these beasts around.

There’s also a scene where Crow goes to see what can only be described as a witch to get a weapon so he can destroy Red Bluster. It’s a convenient scene, for sure, but more importantly, it really ruins the world. Now that there’s magic, how does this effect everything else? What are its limits? Are there more people with these powers? There’s also the fact she says she will take “everything” from Crow as payment, which suggests either his life or his soul will be hers, but this is never payed off and he uses the weapon with no payback. It’s a shame this was included, as he could easily have gone to see, say, a blacksmith or gunsmith to get a weapon made, without the need to introduce fantasy to a largely practical world.

Something the film mentions then completely forgets about is that the King and Queen have built a massive warship so that their own navy can hunt these creatures on their own. It’s for this reason that Crow gets one last chance to go after Red Bluster: if he can catch the beast, then the hunters get to continue their trade, otherwise it will be handed over to the navy. There’s no pay off to this scene. The only time we see the ship again is a few minutes before it’s destroyed. This is a missed opportunity, as playing into this plotline, and the fact Crow is fighting for his way of life, his family’s legacy, could have added an extra spike to his obsession with killing Red.

Before we get to the really bad stuff, I just want to take a moment to mention some of the things this film does really well. For a start, it looks amazing. The animation is beautiful, and you can see that a lot of work has been put into it. Red Bluster might look a bit bland, but everything else is great and incredibly detailed, with a kind of One Piece feel to it. It’s also surprising how accurate it is in some respects, with the weapons, sailing, terminology, etc, which is always nice to see, even in a fantasy movie.

But if there’s one thing about the movie that really flops, it’s the ending. Crow captures Bluster and drags her back into port, so he can present her before the King and Queen to deliver the killing blow, except he’s stopped by Jacob and Maisie who reveal that these creatures are not really bad, the whole history of them attacking villages and sinking ships is a lie. The monsters didn’t attack first, they were provoked by the royals, for some reason. I’m not really sure what’s meant to be going on here. They’ve been publishing books filled with the fake myths so people will want to become monster hunters, but why? They don’t profit from the trade, and if the monsters are naturally docile then they aren’t a threat to trade. What makes this even worse is that the villains (if you can call them that) are badly set up, barely appearing in the movie before the ending.

This is the real disappointing thing about the film. At the point where it was revealed that the beasts were actually good, I thought, okay, if this is going to work, it needs a really strong payoff, and sadly that wasn’t delivered. I have to praise this film for its premise, I was invested from the first scene, I liked the characters and even managed to remember their names, which is always a good sign. But there are so many little things, and a couple of really big things, wrong with this that I can’t say it’s a great movie.

It was only after I’d watched it that I discovered it was a Netflix movie, which might explain some of the problems. But I was more surprised to learn that it’s got a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, which seems strangely high for a movie like this. Maybe 2022 was just a dry year for great animation.

I get the feeling that either things were cut from this movie, or the production was rushed before a proper script was completed, or else the studio got involved to meddle with things they should have left alone, because the first half of the movie is excellent, and deserves that high RT score. The second part, however, is just a massive miss, which doesn’t deliver on any of the promises.

It’s a real shame, as there’s so much potential her to have made a really great movie that could have become an all-time classic. As it is, is fails to live up to movies like Shrek and The Incredibles. One way I judge children’s movies is whether they can be enjoyed by both adults and children. The answer here is yes to the first half, where characters like Jacob and Crow are deep enough to engage with, but no to the second where it all falls flat and cliched. It’s all great fun for kids, but doesn’t have any emotional weight or narrative substance to any of it, which would be a big disappointment to an older audience.

There’s currently a sequel in development, which I would probably watch just to see if it can improve things, but for now, I can’t recommend The Sea Beast, unless you just watch the first hour, then, maybe I would.

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