The Sea Beast - It Has Problems

I had many qualms with The Sea Beast movie but I can’t remember most of them now, so I’m just going to go with the ones I can remember. 

An absolutely brilliant start sets you up for something the movie never becomes, despite later similar scenes. It’s almost like a genre jump, but instead it really just undermines its own set up. As you probably already know I like protagonists fighting with Beasts. What I don’t like is when it’s set up to be this only for it later to become, oh, the Beast is nice and misunderstood, and let’s make some upper-class humans the real villains instead. 

Yes, it was okay to have these human characters, in fact they are perfect for the setup of the stakes, but they would have been better as secondary villains or even as simply a device. This so called twist – been done quite a few times now so easy to see coming after that initial give away shot if you know what to look for – undermines everything the movie sets itself up to be before this point. 

This is not a good thing, because the movie it was was a much better product than the one we ended up with. In actual fact, things began to go downhill with the setup stakes I previously mentioned, as the film restricted itself to a kill-the-beast race, when it could have been something a lot more complex without losing the younger part of the audience. 

Oh, here’s another thing I remember. The Sea Beast is very derivative. At first I thought it was clever to combine such different things as Moby Dick and Annie, as obvious examples, but when you look back after you’ve finished watching the movie it just looks lazy and unoriginal. There was an audiobook of a novel I listened to with an orphan girl and a cat called Scaramouche. It was beat for beat Oliver Twist, and I mean the book, so a lot more beats. You could literally make a chart. 

The Sea Beast reminds me of this. It feels it is literally doing the same story but with different characters playing the parts of the originals. The only reason it’s not so obvious in this film is because of the unfulfilled setup I previously mentioned, giving the impression of original direction.

Without spoiling anything nearly all the characters reach their end points unconvincingly, and you get the feeling the writers really don’t know their characters, almost as if they’ve copied pasted everything but their final scenes from somewhere else. Maybe they have.

The speech at the end. Yes, there’s this speech at the end that is basically used to create an uprising in very general terms. Boy, do I have issues with this. Why would the main characters believe this would work? Why would the people follow a small child they’ve never seen before because she tells them they’ve been lied to? They wouldn’t, whether the beast is there or not. Not even with her interactions with it. At any rate, the fact I’m having to analyse for potential reasons they might believe at the very least proves the movie is not communicating. 

These people have believed in all this stuff for years and it has cost countless lives. There’s no way it would be that easy. Even if it did work somehow the population would have to go through a variation on the stages of grief, starting with denial. 

They wouldn’t act, simple as that. It’s not only that, though. People won’t listen to just anyone because they are on some pedestal, not when they already have ingrained beliefs. This kid has no charisma, no education that might have meant people gave her chance despite everything, and the words she uses are too simple. They are not convincing arguments, or even details about what has happened that ring true. 

Also, people don’t believe children just like that. Even if they didn’t think she was lying, they might think she was wrong, making things up, playing, had a nightmare, trying for attention, the list goes on. There certainly wouldn’t be a united front among the spectators, and if starvation in Tsarist Russia doesn’t immediately lead to revolution on its own, what hope in hell is there in this situation?

It would at least appear that everyone lives relatively comfortable lives too. This would make them complacent in such matters, and they wouldn’t be willing to risk their lifestyle. People that rebel most likely would need to have nothing to lose. It isn’t like the people are significantly dissatisfied with the royals either.

Just one final detail. The king and queen could have bluffed ignorance when the truth came out. This is what real villains would have done, whether long-term schemers or cowards. The whole thing was set in train by a previous ruler. It would be perfectly believable to the population that they were carrying on what the old king had started, in ignorance of the reality. 

Maybe it wouldn’t have been a good ending unless a sequel was wanted, or maybe it would require too much of a pace and content change to include the material which would need to follow, but the least the creators could do was change it enough so the king and queen had no way of bluffing their way out of things. They aren’t great villains, but their limitations are made far too obvious by this detail. It dreadfully undermines them and their characters, despite not being that impressive to start with. They are now lame villains. Speaking of villain lameness . . .