That Pierce Brosnan mermaid-murder fantasy movie isn’t as weird as it sounds
The King’s Daughter is an expensive-looking fantasy epic that spent close to a decade on the shelf, only to creep into wide release on a barren weekend in January, with relatively little advance promotion. Based on this anti-pedigree and its wild fantasy plot about magic and mermaid-murder, it has all the makings of a glorious cinematic disaster. So it’s perversely disappointing to learn that it’s a middling family-friendly movie with mere undertones of oddness.
The film is based on Vonda N. McIntyre’s 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun, the fantasy that beat George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones to the 1997 Best Novel Nebula Award. her book is a hybrid of sci-fi and historical romance that includes sea monsters, hidden treasure, forbidden love, and the Pope. The movie is considerably simplified from that story — it’s a fantasy-adventure with hastily added, largely redundant Julie Andrews narration to give it the veneer of a cozy fairy tale.
In this form, its story concerns Marie-Josèphe (Kaya Scodelario), the headstrong secret daughter of 17th-century French king Louis XIV (Pierce Brosnan). Louis has captured a mermaid (Fan Bingbing), who he plans to sacrifice during an eclipse, so he can sap its life force and achieve immortality. Marie-Josèphe’s tentative relationship with the mermaid gets in the way of that plan. Yet The King’s Daughter is rarely as weird as that description. It offers the bittersweet spectacle of a pretty loony movie trying its best to become a more conventional one. Maybe an outright boondoggle would have been more memorable.
It’s no accident that all this sounds like a flashback to the mid-2010s, when slightly odd (but not quite odd enough) epics like 2013’s 47 Ronin and 2014’s Seventh Son attempted
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