115 min | PG | June 24, 2022 | Netflix
A celebrated monster hunter and a stubborn orphan sail off to kill the most feared beast in the sea. What they find is that the kingdom has been lying for centuries about who the monsters really are. The adventure is grand. The history lesson lands harder.
The kingdom celebrates its monster hunters as heroes. They sail out on royal commission to kill the sea beasts that menace the coast. Jacob Holland is the best of them. Maisie Brumble is an orphan who has memorized every hunter’s legend and decides to live one herself. She stows away on the great ship the Inevitable, and the voyage becomes an interrogation of the stories that put her there. The Sea Beast is a swashbuckling adventure that is really about how a nation manufactures its enemies and pays men to keep killing them.
Karl Urban voices Jacob Holland with weathered warmth and a fighter’s reflexive bravado. He plays a man who has never questioned the hunt and slowly learns to. Zaris-Angel Hator gives Maisie Brumble stubbornness and grief in equal measure. She refuses to be a passenger in her own adventure. Jared Harris voices Captain Crow as a man consumed by vengeance against the beast that took his eye, and Harris finds the rot under the heroism. Marianne Jean-Baptiste makes first mate Sarah Sharpe the most clear-eyed person on the deck.
Chris Williams directs and writes with Nell Benjamin, and the film carries the muscle of his earlier studio adventures. The animation treats the ocean as a character. Water sheets off the hull with distinct weight, foam scatters under harpoon fire, and light bends through the swells when the beasts surface from below. The creature design favors strange over scary. Red, the great beast at the center, reads as curious and enormous rather than monstrous. The ship itself looks lived in, all weathered timber and salt-stained rope, which grounds the spectacle in labor.
The plot follows a familiar shape. The reluctant hero, the brave child, the journey that overturns everything they believed. The Sea Beast knows these beats and hits them cleanly, and Dan Stevens lends the scheming Admiral Hornagold the oily ambition the story needs. What lifts the film is its willingness to say that the heroes are wrong and the war is a lie someone profits from. It hands that argument to a child and trusts her to win it. The adventure entertains, and the idea underneath it has teeth.