The King's Daughter

The King's Daughter

King Louis XIV's quest for immortality leads him to capture and steal a mermaid's life force, a move that is further complicated by his illegitimate daughter's discovery of the creature.

  • Released: 2022-01-21
  • Runtime: 94 minutes
  • Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Romance
  • Stars: Pierce Brosnan, Kaya Scodelario, Benjamin Walker, Rachel Griffiths, Julie Andrews, Fan Bingbing, William Hurt, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Paul Ireland, Pablo Schreiber, Crystal Clarke, Kaya Blocksage, Kasia Kaczmarek, Tom Morton, Tiffany Hofstetter, Jessica Clarke, Virginia Bowers, Marc de Panda, Jorja Lindsay, Diane Duquesne, Jean-Baptiste Sagory
  • Director: Sean McNamara
 Comments
  • Jackbv123 - 25 February 2024
    Fantasy meets history
    I am surprised by the ratings and reviews. I have reviewed over 1500 movies and tv shows with a strong leaning toward the smaller screen products. I rate based on enjoyment and I really enjoyed this. I am a fan of Fantasy, especially if there is some romance involved, so this hit my wheelhouse (to badly twist an expression).

    The story is clearly immersed in magical realms, but there is a surprising amount of reality in the character portrayals. Also there is a generous amount of sappiness. Perhaps it is that last which elevates my liking above the rest of the crowd for this movie.

    Kaya Scodelario convinces me of the wonder she undergoes both with the mermaid and with the setting in Versailles including the King. Brosnan almost convinces me of the cynicism and political savvy in his character, the King. The scenes of his confessions to the priest present an interesting juxtaposition to that savvy, but with obvious hypocrisy. Then as the movie progresses, we see some of his humanity trying to peek out. Hurt presents a priest who is a little more sincere in his faith than I am used to after seeing more than a few Three Musketeer stories. The political intrigue and dominance of the King is sanitized some leaving a hint of the brutality without resorting to anything grisly. However, if you think about the life Marie-Josephe had at the convent, it was one so miserable as to be abusive. It is extraordinary, and perhaps even hard to believe, that she retained an independent and even contentious spirit.

    I would hope that Scodelario and her real life husband Benjamin Walker had good chemistry! But there was so much going on that their relationship was hardly the central focus of the story. As I discuss above, the acting was fine for me in that it at least conveyed the characters and their emotional conflicts. The story had real drama and there was decent dialogue. As to scenery, I'm not sure I have ever seen Versailles presented so expansively.

    BTW - am I the only person wondering how they all travelled 150 plus km to the ocean so quickly or on one horse each?
  • joette-67783 - 15 June 2023
    Big surprise
    I wasn't expecting much when I first saw the previews but I figured good actors so I will give it a try. I absolutely loved this movie. There wasn't one part that I didn't like . It didn't have naked people and it didn't have people having sex so it was a perfect family movie. We all absolutely enjoyed it. I find every single actor played their part well. Some I couldn't stand because they played their part so well and some I absolutely believed every second of their acting. I just wish their would be a part two because I would love to see more of their adventures and also the father daughter interaction too.
  • SnoopyStyle - 7 October 2022
    lifeless writing
    It's 1684 Versailles. King Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnan) is the longest reigning monarch in history. He has absolute power over all he surveys except for time. He wants immortality. He sends Captain Yves (Benjamin Walker) on a dangerous mission to retrieve an Atlantean mermaid. Dr. Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber) plans to sacrifice the mermaid for his King. Pere La Chaise (William Hurt) sees it as an afront to God. Meanwhile, the King brings composer Marie-Josephe (Kaya Scodelario) to court. She was raised in a convent, and no one knows that she is actually the King's secret daughter.

    Pierce Brosnan is close to 70 but he looks closer to 50. That works against him in this role. In order to heighten the intensity, the stakes have to be greater. He should be a decrepit old man on his last leg. He should be desperate to hold off death. The point should be this is his last chance for life. There is simply a blandness to the writing despite the use of the Versailles location. Even with the attempted grandness, this feels lackluster. More could be done with the mermaids, but they are nothing more than CGI creatures. It's all very lifeless.
  • IonicBreezeMachine - 28 May 2022
    8 years sitting on a shelf gives us an absolute mess.
    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.
  • hughchilles - 22 April 2022
    Pretty
    This movie has a lot going for it, maintains attention throughout, nice messages, most of all it's beautiful like a blend of a Turner painting and Pirates of the Caribbean. Unfortunately it lacks the action of pirates and the drama of other period movies, it sits neatly between in a league if it's own a 40million dollar scifi period drama and personally I really enjoyed it. The performances especially really sold the film, they're grounded but still fantastic, surreal and lavish. A nice family night's viewing that doesn't deserve the harsh reviews or the 39million dollar loss.