The Sea Beast [2022]
“...terrible sea beasts would ravage our shores, and no ship was safe on the sea.”
The Sea Best is Netflix’ newest attempt at creating an animated library to rival that of Disney’s. In addition to 2020’s Over the Moon and 2021’s The Mitchells vs the Machines, Netflix has, uh... not figured it out yet. Similar to both of those titles, Beast begins to tell a story in a beautifully animated and gorgeously stylized world… but forgets to take any of that style or flair across the finish line and actually have something to say.
We begin with a fairytale reading from what is to be one of our main characters, and she is great. She’s the most interesting character in the film and has the best writing... which makes her stand out in a way that is jarring rather than endearing. We’re then transported into an action scene where the animation REALLY begins to shine. At one point I had the thought of, “This isn’t a movie, this is just a tech demo,” because some of the water effects are so impressive. The problem is… this is where the film peaks. About 10 minutes in.
Absolutely nothing about this film is original, clever, or unique. It does some things very well [depicting stylized sea travel for instance] and is truly beautiful to behold, but it doesn’t do anything that a million other movies have done before it. So, if you’ve ever seen [insert movie title here], you’ll know exactly what to expect every step of the way.
This is not to say that Beast is boring, however. Quite the opposite, I enjoyed every minute of this film…
…until there were no minutes left that is.
I can’t think of any other recent film [or any animated film at all] that features a 2-hour runtime but still feels incomplete in the way that Beast does. By the end of the 120-minutes I’d just sat through, I was ready for 120 more. The world Beast builds is absolutely beautiful but, we get to explore almost NONE of it, and we understand even less. The characters are expressive and intriguing… but we don’t get to know any of them and the conflict has potential to be “epic” in a way that would translate literally and not just as a way for a YouTuber to describe a cool bug they found. I am being completely non-hyperbolic when I say that I could have watched another 2-hours of this if the end of the movie revealed it was all just a prologue to the bigger picture.
Unfortunately… that isn’t what we get.
Instead, we get a nice, tidy, boring bow that leaves nearly… every… single… plot point, completely moot. It is one of the most disappointing ends to a film I can think of in recent history. Every conflict wraps up either offscreen, in a way that it was going to resolve without any interference from the characters, or is completely forgotten about and passed off. It’s a very strange type of letdown and the only part of the story that I did not see coming.
I think animated films get away with a lot of nonsense because they’re “for kids”, and this one takes that to a whole different [and very frustrating] level by creating a world with some incredibly rich depth… and doing nothing with it. Where most films of this nature just create surface level experiences with no hope of anything more, it’s the potential that lies beneath The Sea Beast’s waves that truly makes you wish there was more to this voyage.
"You can be a hero, and still be wrong."
