The King's Daughter

William Hurt was a great actor so it's a shame that this was probably his last film.

If you want to see him flex his acting chops , see Body Heat,The Big Chill or Mr Brooks.

A great actor who hopefully be remembered for better things than this movie.

RIP William Hurt.

Some think this might be William Hurt's last movie but it isn't. The filming was done in 2014, seven years before his death, but was only released in 2022. He plays a priest that was the confessor to France's King Louis XIV in the 17th century.

The crux of the story is that the King's doctor thinks Mermaids have a magical quality and if they can catch one and dissect it then they can bestow the King with immortality at the next total solar eclipse, to occur in a few days.

Other than the King, his Confessor, his doctor, and the Mermaid, the pivotal character is a young lady who thinks she is an orphan and has spent her life growing up in a strict convent. She is in fact the King's daughter, her mother died right after childbirth, the public does not know about her. She has always had an affinity for the sea and finds that she and the Mermaid bond easily.

As with all fairy tales there is an underlying message about humanity, in this one it is the King arriving at the point where he no longer cares only about himself. My wife and I enjoyed it at home, streaming on FreeTV with a few commercials. We enjoyed it, we were entertained.

A young girl with a talent for writing music is introduced to the king's court, where she befriends a mermaid.

The plot is very simplistic and the characters are a bit two dimensional, but it contains magic and mermaids This is not the film for a middle-aged man but younger viewers, especially girls, will love it.

Set in France during the rule of King Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnan), The King, having grown fearful of his own mortality enlists a ship of fisherman lead by captain Yves De La Croix (Benjamin Walker) to find a mermaid (Fan Bingbing) so a ceremony can be performed during an eclipse where The King will consumer her life force and gain immortality. Meanwhile at a convent, free spirited orphan, Mari-Josephe (Kaya Scodelario), has been summoned to Versailles by the king's Father Confessor, Pere La Chaise (William Hurt), at the king's request to be the court composer unaware she's the king's daughter. As Marie Joseph adjusts to the strange and unfamiliar world of Versailles, she finds herself called by the mermaid and befriends her.

The King's Daughter is a very loose adaptation of the 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun, written by Vonda N. McIntyre, better known for her contributions to Star Wars and Star Trek in novel form with aspects such as the given names of Sulu and Uhura rendered canon. The movie had a long development cycle beginning in 1999 with The Jim Henson Company and eventually moving to Walt Disney Pictures where it lingered in development hell. The project was revived I 2013 when Sean McNamara joined the project as director and filming finally beginning in 2014. While initially set for an August 2014 release by Paramount Pictures, three weeks prior to the release Paramount pulled the film from the release schedule without explanation with only vague stories of "additional visual effects work" released through industry trades. The film sat on a shelf for 8 years in limbo with McNamara having released six movies in the interim since filming it. After being retitled The King's Daughter, the movie was acquired by smaller distributor Gravitas Ventures who re-edited the film with some opening and closing narration by Julie Andrews. When the movie was released in the January dumping ground of 2022, reviews were not kind and the film only gathered about $1.8 million against its $40 million budget. The King's Daughter has all the telltale signs of a troubled production that's been attempted to be salvaged by being reversed engineered into a Disney-esque fairy tale, but whatever vision originally intended has been clouded by years of post-production hell and misguided salvage.

From the beginning where our film opens with a CGI rendered book opening as read by Julie Andrews as if we're being told a fairy tale, it becomes painfully clear that this narration and this book was not the original intent. After a "blink and you'll miss it" text dump expositing about Louis the XIV and his quest to find the mermaid, Miss Andrews has the thankless job of repeating the same information over again as we go through a poorly rendered CGI book with pictures that are just stills from the movie run through a filter to make them resemble painting (honestly it looks like it's not that far above most gimmick filters on your average smartphone). The opening act is just a mess with the story jumping between The Convent, Versaille, and the expedition to find the mermaid lead by Yves De La Croix and it's both very choppy and rapidly paced so the audience is being suffocated with a lot of exposition about the mermaid, the state of France's and King Louis's power and standing, or various other aspects of the plot that are just rushed through and not given the buildup they should be given especially in a story where you trying to merge real life people with fantasy elements.

The movie fares maybe the tiniest bit better in the acting department, but even then I'm not sure I'd classify any performance as "good". William Hurt gives regrettably his final on screen performance before his death in 2022 (albeit filmed in 2014) and for what it's worth Hurt does do a decent job of conveying Pere La Chaise as a man torn between his devotion to God and loyalty to his king with Hurt's more subdued delivery fitting well with a character who's supposed to be a man of faith. Pierce Brosnan is entertaining as King Louis the XIV, even if he does flirt with going over the top, and the scenes between Brosnan and Hurt do seem like they're trying to bring something to this movie. Kaya Scodelario plays our main protagonist as Marie-Josephe and while Scodelario has had a successful career since this movie with her part in the Maze Runner trilogy, Crawl, and the Ted Bundy film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Scodelario is given nothing to work with as she is portrayed in a very clunky fashion that feels like a crude facsimile of a Disney princess archetype. Benjamin Walker also plays Yves as the love interest and the chemistry between the two of them just doesn't come through on camera. Fan Bingbing gets massively shorts rifted here as the mermaid really doesn't have a character down to the fact she can't talk and serves as a glorified macguffin who often doesn't share the screen with live action actors with the mermaid effects falling into the uncanny valley. The movie tries to file down some of its rougher edges from whatever the earlier version of this film was to try and make it similar to one of those Disney live-action remakes, but when you have scenes of King Louis confessing his sexual indiscretions or dry sequences discussing the nature God versus science (with Science represented with a cartoonishly evil strawman), it doesn't seem like the type of movie that's made for a family audience because despite it's attempts to frame this story as a fairy tale, it just isn't and was clearly never intended to be presented this way.

The King's Daughter is just a mess. While there's clear indication the actors are trying, their work is faced with a Sisyphean challenge against confused editing and a story lacking in clarity as to how and why certain things came into being. The movie just doesn't work on any level, but especially not as the family centered fairy tale it's been reversed engineered into.

Just look at that cast: Pierce Brosnan, magnificent as an all powerful yet decadent king, William Hurt, great as always as the king's cardinal, Kaya Scodelario, beautiful as ever, Pablo Schreiber as the villain, Rachel Griffiths in a tiny role, even Fan Bingbing as... the non talking CGI creature?! And it's a fairy tale about Louis XIV's France, shot at Versailles, featuring a mermaid! How can you get this wrong?

And wrong they got it. A complete mess where the only redeeming quality is the acting and interaction of Brosnan and Hurt. It's not unwatchable, but a clear failure. And I get it, really. It's not easy to basically do a Disney film (mermaid, pirates, princesses, pompous figures in fancy clothes) in 2015, especially on a budget and with your parent company delaying the release for seven years. But they could have tried harder, made it a two parter, given the characters time to grow and for the viewers to get attached to them. Instead it feels like a bed time story read by a tired parent who just wants to go to sleep.