The Sea Beast

The Sea Beast is a movie that shows absolute buckets of potential but ultimately disappoints. It engages in some of the best world building I’ve seen in a children’s movie, only to throw it all away on familiar and trite storytelling, exclusively found in the second half of the film.

The movie starts out awesome. It presents you with this incredible and richly imagined world with tons of fun details and logical justifications for all of its peculiarities. The central conceit is that within the film’s setting, an island empire made wealthy by trade, the ocean’s waters have long been plagued by a variety of sea beasts that attack ships, and even sometimes the shores, and must therefore be hunted to make the waterways safe and clear for human existence. At the center of this concern are the valiant and fearless Hunters, crews of brave sailors led by equally brilliant and badass captains, who chase down and slay these sea beasts. The entire thing somehow evokes both the best parts of a whaling story like Moby Dick and the best parts of a wild naval adventure a la Master and Commander or Treasure Island.

Based on the art direction, from the design of the ships to the dominant style of dress, it is clear that the movie takes inspiration from the shipboard adventures of stories from the Napoleonic era and the age of piracy. Similarly, the design and conceptualization of the sea beasts themselves, as well as their placement in the world, reflects a creative spark ignited by hundreds of years old artistic renderings of kraken and sea serpent attacks found on the edges of old sea maps, like those of cartographer Olaus Magnus. The film does an excellent job of bringing these inspirations together to make the world feel completely real and lived in, from the land-bound population’s hero worship of the hunters to the totally believable set of tricks and techniques that the best hunters use to find and claim their quarries. For anyone like me, who relishes in the romanticization of sailing ships and the sea, the setting is an absolute dream.

And the first act does an exceptional job of providing every piece of pertinent exposition without ever feeling clunky, preachy, or over-explanatory. This can be tough in any movie, but for a kids/family movie, it is rarer still. The movie begins to set up a lot of interesting ideas, from the incursion of the navy into the matters of the hunters, for which they have a lot of confidence and governmental support but little skill, and a potentially quite fruitful story of generations and adopted fatherhood, with an aging captain looking to hand the reins of his famed ship to his “son,” and that son grappling with a stow away girl that is a lot like he was when he first came aboard the ship (both good and bad).

Then, around the halfway point of the movie, Sea Beast veers wildly into a different direction and makes a mess of its amazing setting and first act. That direction is, to be frank, just a second rate How to Train Your Dragon rip off.

Not only does the film fall artlessly into the “the enemies aren’t that bad and/or are misunderstood” trope that How to Train Your Dragon does, and does well in my opinion, but it also adopts much of the art style and creature design of How to Train Your Dragon as well. The big red sea beast that anchors this twist, such that it is, shares the smoothish scales, rounded mouth and snout, recessed teeth, and large, expressive cat-like eyes with its counterparts in How to Train Your Dragon. However, in that film, there are layers of justification built up for both why the first dragon, Toothless, would (reluctantly) trust a human with whom they had previously had an adversarial relationship, why the human would take an interest in nurturing that relationship with something he previously feared, and why the dragons and humans might eventually find common ground fighting together rather than apart. None of this leg work is done in The Sea Beast. Gone are the interesting and internally, logically consistent behaviors of the world the first act does so well. Instead, people go along with the gag even though they don’t really have a reason to do so other than that’s what the script tells them to do.

The girl who befriends big red isn’t a social outcast looking for purpose or meaning to their life. She is someone who grew up idolizing hunters and wants nothing more than to be one herself. Why would she suddenly decide to about-face, essentially unprompted? Big red has lived untold years, though the movie hints at it being at least several generations of humankind, and through most of that has seen both itself and its kin hunted by humans. Why would it decide to trust any human, let alone a couple of former hunters, in any capacity? And the movie goes on like this, for the remainder of the runtime, forcing narrative beats and character moments according to some formulaic understanding of family friendly storytelling but without any of the care and cleverness that made the first half so wonderfully enjoyable.

I understand that it is hard to make a movie like this in the modern age, where thought must be given to all the potential criticism the writer might face. There is pressure to be nuanced and morally relativistic with the messaging, cognizant of the concept of cycles of violence and open to the idea that strict interpretations of good and evil are not always correct. There is pressure to be environmentally conscious, acknowledging that no matter how “scary” a creature might be it serves a valuable purpose in its ecosystem and has a right to live without human interference. However, this is also a made up fantasy world where you can adjust the rules as you like. No one has a problem with Sauron being destroyed in Lord of the Rings as he is essentially the pure personification of evil. In the world of The Sea Beast, they could have told an amazing naval adventure story about generational passing of the proverbial torch, fatherhood in its myriad forms, and what it means to meet your idols, with the backdrop of fantastical sea battles against unequivocally dangerous and deservingly hunted giant beasts of the sea. They could have made something that was wholly unique, immensely thrilling and engaging, and befitting of the care and attention to detail that was given its world building and inspirations. And I would have loved to have seen that movie. But, of course, they didn’t.

Would Recommend: If you are interested in some of the best world building available in a movie for kids.

Would Not Recommend: If you want something that pays off that best in class world building.