REVIEW: The Sea Beast [2022]

Rating: PG | Runtime: 115 minutes
Release Date: June 24th, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Netflix Animation / Netflix
Director(s): Chris Williams
Writer(s): Chris Williams and Nell Benjamin / Chris Williams (story)

But you can be a hero and still be wrong.

If there’s one thing everyone knows, it’s that beasts kill humans. This is why the king and queen have commissioned monster hunters for centuries to sail the unknown seas and take down whatever creatures they find before they can do the same to us. The men and women who accomplish this feat—whether surviving or not—become heroes for whom books are written to immortalize their exploits.

Those are the stories young Maisie (Zaris-Angel Hator) has clung to ever since her parents were murdered on one such expedition and why she wants nothing more than to follow in their footsteps aboard the famed Captain Crow’s (Jared Harris) vessel the Inevitable alongside the legendary Jacob Holland (Karl Urban).

Chris Williams’ (co-written by Nell Benjamin) The Sea Beast starts as a pirate romp as a result. We see the wreckage of these water wars of attrition via flashback and the high octane swashbuckling action of a present-day excursion into the mysterious Dregmorr. And with stunning animation, an upbeat score, and an exciting cast of eccentrics led by First Mate Sarah Sharpe (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), that would be enough.

Like with How to Train Your Dragon, however, the appeal of also supplying a worthy lesson about the ways in which we treat nature and impulsively act with fear soon takes over. Because who remembers a sea beast actually attacking a town in the past? When has there ever been a battle outside of an arena humans voluntarily entered for their own pursuit of violence?

Leave it to Maisie’s youth to allow her to have the wherewithal to keep asking questions when the adults no longer can. Because we can’t necessarily blame Crow or Jacob for their beliefs when they were indoctrinated at birth and since scarred by the carnage wrought by their jobs. It doesn’t therefore matter to them who started what. They are paid to protect home by traveling the ocean and killing monsters.

Whether it’s them looking for that fight and the beasts defending themselves in response doesn’t matter once the blood begins to spill. Only Maisie has the perspective to take a moment and step back. And only someone with Jacob’s stature can platform what she discovers in a way that lets it be heard.

That latter fact won’t be an easy one to bring to fruition, though. Not when all Jacob has ever known is the opposite. So, when “Red” (what Maisie calls the most fearsome of these beasts) inexplicably saves him, it’s still not enough. Luckily, that salvation comes at the cost of his transportation and his proximity to home, so he’ll have about an hour of runtime to soften to the idea.

A three-day journey upon its back with Maisie’s unyielding optimism and empathy can change even the most hardened mind—and none are more stubborn than Crow when vengeance has his temper flaring. It becomes a surprisingly emotional journey pitting duty against justice and memory against doctrine to find out that being a hero doesn’t automatically mean you’re right. Oh, and abolish the monarchy too.