The Sea Beast (2022)

PG for people dying by sea beast and sea beasts dying by people.  It's the lightest version of a scary concept, though.  Yeah, I don't think my little ones would be the biggest fans of the scares in this movie, but it does have such a light tone that it is hard to fault the movie.  The most upsetting stuff in the movie, honestly, is how people treat other people.  There's also the notion of unnatural magics that are considered evil.  PG.

DIRECTOR: Chris Williams

Oh man, I have a lot to say about this movie and I'm kind of driven to write.  But I also know that I'm not going to get this whole thing down in one sitting, so I'm considering just giving up and putzing for a bit.  I don't know what it is about pirate-y movies, but they really don't do a lot for me.  It's not to say that I didn't enjoy The Sea Beast.  I actually liked it a lot more than I planned to. But this movie is way too pirate-y for me to have any lasting relationship with this movie.  In fact, one of the motivators for writing this blog as quickly as I can is the notion that I'm already forgetting basic things about this movie.  

Mind you, that's for a couple of reasons.  As I mentioned, piratey things?  Not for me.  I mean, I tolerate them fine.  But they are just other adventures when I am looking for something very specific.  But the bigger deal, and this might be the crux of my argument throughout this blog, is that it is just a bit of a knock-off of How to Train Your Dragon.  "But, Tim," you may ask, "don't dragons fly?"  You'd be right.  Most dragons fly.  But in the way that there are only a few plots out there, this is fundamentally a story about a race of creatures who are misunderstood to be vicious killers only to reveal that the real monster is man.  There's a plucky kid who is willing to take down society and fight for creatures who have the potential to wipe out scores of people before being slowed down.  The humans and the beast learn to live in symbiosis and we can't imagine what it was like to live without these creatures.  I mean, it's all spelled out for you in the first few mintues of the movie.  Yeah, there's an important theme that I'm going to hang my hat on pretty strongly later.  But in terms of plot, there's nothing to look forward to.  If I can quote myself from when I first started writing this blog, it's pretty "paint-by-number."

I can't leave this blog to be just, "It's just How to Train Your Dragon" (Although it totally is and I can't stress that enough!).  After all, I said that I liked this movie and --get ready for blasphemy! --I don't even like How to Train Your Dragon that much.  There is something that makes me like this movie.  And it is so me and so on the nose me that I can't not be insufferable about it. (It's okay, because I'm politically insensed anyways because of the proud meninists that are in my class.)  I'm about to say some words and I have to stress that I'm intentionally using them.  They are not accurate words, but they have a cultural meaning beyond their denonative status.  Here we go.  I really appreciate and borderline love The Sea Beasts because it is pro-CRT.  Okay, see?  I got the emotional impact that I was going for and now I can break that down.  CRT, what most people don't realize, is a pretty heady concept about how laws are either intentionally or unintentionally racist.  The whole hullaballoo about CRT was a fundamental understanding of what CRT was, thinking that any kind of Black history, especially if it was directly stemming from the evils of slavery, was considered inaccurate.  Okay.  Basically, to remove something that most schools couldn't even integrate into a pre-higher education curriculum, the far-right started deleting things that were appropriately taught, namely a culture and a history that is vital to who we are as a people.

But then, where does The Sea Beast come in?  There's this great subplot, far more interesting than the rehashed plot that the rest of the movie offers, where Maisie starts questioning the books that she's been devoted to her entire life.  Now, the dangers of this plot are numerous.  For those going with knee-jerk reactions, which unfortunately is most of America right now, is that books are lies and that you can't trust anything you read.  It also could be used that Maisie uses anecdotal evidence to make decisions.  Instead, if America would just take a gosh-darned breath, you would notice that Maisie uses all of the resources available to her, to verify the authenticity of a text.  When she sees that her anecdotal evidence doesn't match the content of books, she starts looking at bias in books.  Upon further inspection, she sees that all of the books have been basically government propaganda, published by the same source.  Now, why I used the phrase "CRT" earlier is that the consequence of most of America flipping out over the phrase CRT was the notion that we shouldn't be analyzing cultural bias in texts.  

Again, completely White Knighting here and I apologize, but I love the idea of the 1619 Project.  The 1619 Project and CRT are easily connected by the right as Woke revisionism, but that's such an underread of the story.  Let's use Maisie as the example because, after all, this is a blog about The Sea Beast.  Maisie's discovery that the books in the kingdom have all been promoted by the King and Queen to keep the lower classes focused on an external enemy rather than question their own financial standings.  After all, when we're all working together to take down giant sea beasts, can we really question the government that is keeping the whole thing together under such trying times?  And it's not like people aren't being encouraged to read. What is being written has elements of verisimilitude.  It has real people and mostly real stories.  But they are devoid of context.  Conservative America would look at Maisie as trying to erase a belief that people have defined themselves by. Captain Crow is a hero of these stories.  He's sacrificed life and eyeball to this quest. As proven by Red's defensive, yet aggressive behavior, there's some truth that the sea beasts are dangerous.  

But this is where Maisie's story gains importance.  Remember, 1619 Project isn't about erasing as it is about contextualizing.  More information isn't bad.  Maisie, when she reveals that the sea beasts have degrees of sentience and many of their actions were done out of self-defense, it makes Crow go from looking like a heroic patriot to a zealot.  Jacob Holland, for all of his indoctrination in the old ways, has the blessing of not being the in the spotlight as the captain of the Inevitable.  Yes, his acceptance of new data is slow.  But he's also more vulnerable to listen.  But Crow is part of the old guard.  He is given this option to either accept this new data, which means that everything that he's devoted to has made him a monster, or pretend that the new data is false, maintaining his heroic status.  While I'm not sympathetic to Crow in this movie, his choices make sense.  It's why people are so nervous to accept stuff like the 1619 Project (or as they think it, "CRT").  No one wants to look like the bad guys of history, but it is also important that history is written by the victors.  

As crazy as this is, The Sea Beast is the search for objective truth.  There is a reality that happened, but we choose to bury it because we're afraid of more information.  Yeah, every bit of fact is probably tainted by bias.  But the more information we have, the more of a real picture we gain.  As dumb as The Sea Beast is as an action kids movie, it has an amazing message about critical thinking and evaluating sources.  Sure, I'm probably tainted by the fact that I'm a liberal English teacher.  But this is the kind of storytelling we need right now.  It shouldn't be about believing or not believing.  It's exploring why a story is being told.