The Sea Beast (2022); Official Competition (2021)
Perilous adventure spanning oceans; and a satirical look at moviemaking run amok
Jacob with fellow Hunters pursuing monsters of the Deep in The Sea Beast
The Sea Beast (2022)
Streaming on Netflix
This is a story about heroism among hardy mates at sea, steeled to do battle with enormous monsters of the Deep. Yet, surprisingly, the bravest hero on view is a pint-sized orphan, Maisie Brumble, looking all of 10 years old. And that’s only one of this animated feature’s funny, thrilling reversals of size and scale.
Netflix Animation has engineered this colorful tall tale to enchant younger audiences with swashbuckling action and hairsbreadth, fantastical escapes. But the movie has more than enough spectacle, as well as dark questions of right and wrong, to intrigue adults, too.
With exquisitely detailed production design, it brings to life a heightened, lightly mythologized early 19th century, when ships set sail carrying the fabled Hunters, fiery crew members sworn to track down and kill giant, deadly creatures whose home is the sea.
Throughout her young life, Maisie has devoured books recounting the adventures of Hunters who roamed the oceans to slay giant beasts. Her parents died as crew members on one of these dangerous voyages.
Maisie wants to honor their legacy by becoming a Hunter herself. She stows away on a beast-hunting vessel named, emphatically, The Inevitable. On board, the grizzled old Captain Augustus Crow III takes a fancy to her. He lost an eye 30 years before to a fearsome female sea creature called the Red Bluster, and ever since he’s been bent on avenging his loss by hunting her down, killing her, and, back in his home port, laying her dead carcass before his King and Queen. (Comparisons of Crow to Melville’s obsessed Ahab will pop to mind.)
The Inevitable’s most revered Hunter is Jacob Holland, with his peerless reputation as a monster killer. He brags with a wink that he once dispatched five in two days, an unmatched record. He’s already been marked by Crow as the ship’s next captain.
But helpless young Maisie comes to mean more to Jacob even than his prized reputation. He takes her under his wing. When The Inevitable is nearly destroyed during a pitched, ferocious onslaught from Red Bluster, the seaman and the starry-eyed orphan fall overboard and are cast adrift. The Inevitable, badly damaged, can’t turn back to rescue them. How will they get home?
Two against the Deep: Maisie and Jacob face down fears in The Sea Beast
Suddenly, the story’s strongest, most crucial relationship is between these two. The child too bold for her own safety needs a guiding hand from a ferocious fighter who could use more gentleness and patience. This somehow boyish man and this oddly sly young girl form a trusted bond with the feared, hunted Red Bluster. That’s the movie’s slickest, most captivating turnabout.
What beguiles most here is the meticulous detail. First in the set design. The Inevitable’s lived-in elements, from knives, hooks and sabers on the walls to intricately woven ropes to tacking, billowing sails, make the ship’s swerving and near-sinking feel ominous and real. Nearly all the bustling crew look like distinctive people. I’ll never forget the bulbous nose on one old salt.
I haven’t followed animation closely in recent years, so these accomplishments may not be novel, but I was impressed by the realism of nearly all the characters’ bodily movements (only the King and Queen, looking like Alice in Wonderland grotesques, fell short of the high mark). The characters’ musculature, bone structure and startled, shifting eyes seemed astonishingly lifelike and in-the-moment.
Director Chris Williams, working from the jaunty screenplay he wrote with Nell Benjamin, coaxes subtle vocal performances from the cast. First among equals is Jared Harris as the haunted Captain Crow. Harris seems the actor most deeply caught up in the spirit of the enterprise, chillingly voicing an embittered, hard-driving 19th-century authority figure blinded by hatred and the lure of vengeance.
Karl Urban is amusingly brash and overconfident as Jacob, who’s taken down a peg or two but remains unhesitatingly valiant in the end. Zaris Angel-Hator gives Maisie just the right mix of childish bravado and slowly advancing seriousness. Maisie is a little too much the wise child as the story moves on, yet the script positions her to have the clearest-eyed view, so the actress warmly and crisply says grave things because the other characters, as written, aren’t prepared to say them.
I loved Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s sober, yet humane reading of the tough first mate Sarah Sharpe, with the peg leg and lifelong devotion to Hunting that make her, believably, not just cynical but prudent, not merely a survivor, but a sage.
Swirling, darting visuals (the King and Queen’s gingerbread castle is the only dud) kept me happily scrambling to take in all the action, which never stops. The sea monsters (there are actually four) are truly gigantic, in scale and impact. Big, but also really scary. The underwater shots are so lifelike I felt myself worrying about the characters finding enough breath to reach the surface.
The movie goes both big and deep, thrills the mind and tickles the fancy. Yes, you can be sure there’s also an adorable little creature, too cute for words. In this case it’s a happy-flappy fish named Blue. Pleading eyes, to-die-for little wiggle, the whole cheap, how-can-you-resist deal.
Yet it felt right that Blue stuck around through all the story’s twists and reversals. I finally realized I was him, and this whole gung-ho flight of fancy had given me a lift.
Official Competition (2021)
Penelope Cruz is Lola, who gets whatever she wants in Official Competition
When you get a gander of the flaming nest of red hair framing, nearly enveloping, Penelope Cruz’s gorgeous face in the opening shots of Official Competition, you understand at once this isn’t a woman you’d want to go up against. She plays Lola Cuevas, a celebrated Spanish movie director, and from the moment she opens her mouth, shrewdly cutting a deal for her next picture, we don’t doubt she’s going to get her way.
Lola’s refusal to toss her head, keeping those elegantly coiffed, entangling curls in terrifying balance, is a warning: don’t try to outsmart me. From the fixed, luminous stare Cruz aims at the camera, we know right away what the directors, Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, need Lola to be: an omnivorous entrapment device.
They’ve got the right actress. Cruz’ implacable cool and physical assurance drive the entire first half of this satirical take on moviemaking. We first meet Lola being interviewed by aged billionaire Humberto Suárez (José Luis Gomez), who’s grown indifferent to the 10,000 employees he oversees in his pharmaceutical empire. He also no longer gets any thrill running his dull foundation.
To make a lasting impact on the world, he’s come upon a radical notion. He imagines his enduring contribution could be a movie. That, of course, isn’t just this movie's inciting incident, but its bedrock in-joke. It’s concocted, spiced up and sumptuously laid out for movie industry insiders to chuckle over.
So, big-screen cognoscenti can giggle at this bored CEO, clueless about movies, who’s purchased the rights to a thick, lauded, best-selling novel about two brothers locked in enmity.
Lola, snatching the billionaire's dough, is nobody’s fool. She casts this Cane and Abel rip-off with two actors who couldn’t be more different in style and approach.
For the role of the irresponsible younger brother, she selects Félix Rivero (Antonia Banderas), a rich, sexy, hugely popular star, complete with rancorous ex-wife, far-flung mansions and adoring fan base. His cheerful hedonism and shallow, glitzy “acting” have put him at the top of the glamour heap. In sharp contrast, to play his sober elder brother, Lola casts Iván Torres (Oscar Martinez), a perfect fit for the wary, judgmental role he’ll be playing. Iván is a highly disciplined, aloof acting purist who's also a revered, stonily principled, acting teacher.
Official Competition’s Felix, Lola and Iván: Egos bigger than the picture they’re making?
In the upcoming movie’s long rehearsal process, both men’s gigantic egos keep them at each other’s throats, as they play cheap tricks and fake emotions, both in real life and as the characters they’re portraying. Lola, who’s the director as wicked, gleeful disturber, eggs them on, pulling stunts like binding them together in ropes of plastic bubble wrap to watch helplessly as she grinds their actual acting awards to bits. She tosses some of her own awards into the grinder, too, to show she means to crush her own vanity right along with theirs.
Like that’s going to happen. All three narcissists only grow fiercer, and a kind of controlled mayhem overcomes them. Felix is chronically late, Iván remains prissily austere, and Lola, the driven director with a “vision”, always demands more, more from her actors. Will they finish the picture before finishing off each other?
Cruz, Banderas and Martinez all do fine, calibrated work. Their characters’ raging egomania is far more important to them than the craft of moviemaking, which is the script’s notion of comic irony. So, it follows that the three characters they portray are helplessly, almost ritually, manipulative.
By the end I was the one feeling toyed with.
I wasn’t sure what Lola or her two leading men had at stake in the movie they were making. At some points I thought any one of them might walk away from the whole tawdry exercise. I could understand their exasperation. Why do any of them need this picture, for career reasons or otherwise?
Official Competition’s screenwriters – Cohn, Duprat and the latter’s brother, Andrés Duprat – don’t pursue that question. They say that movies are made to satisfy insatiable egos, not to fashion works of art, so both the fictional script and this movie’s screenplay can loop and bend almost anywhere, let characters pursue any corrupt aim, no matter how preposterous or off the wall. That’s the movie’s cynical, breezily offered point. Don’t look for sense here; we use tricks and create effects to jerk an audience’s chain.
And yet, the movie’s deeply cynical ending, which I won't reveal, insists that something ought to matter. By then, though, wearied by these showoffs’ preening, I couldn’t tell you exactly what.