The Shape of Water (Movie Review)

The Shape of Water
Directed by: Guillermo Del Toro
Written by: Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor
Streaming HD Rental: $5.99

I've never been a big fan of Guillermo Del Toro, but if I had to say which of his films I've enjoyed most, those would be Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone. Blade 2 was good, at least back in the day. The only one of his films I HAVEN'T seen is his first, Cronos. So keep that in mind when I say negative and positive things about The Shape of Water. I've gotten the impression online that if you didn't like this film it's because you're dumb or you just don't get Del Toro or that it's just backlash now that he's "mainstream". So what I'm going to write is from the perspective of someone that has seen 90% of his work.

The Shape of Water, or, as one of my friends affectionately called it, "Grinding Nemo", is about a lonely middle aged woman named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) that works as a custodian in a secret military facility in America during the early 1960s. There she meets and falls in love with The Creature From the Black Lagoon.

The monster is being treated pretty hideously by Bill Hader (aka Michael Shannon) with a cattle prod in what is another in a long line of evil military dudes that want to use the creature's physiology to make stronger soldiers. He has no sympathy for the creature and sees it as an animal. It probably didn't help that the monster bit off two of his fingers.

What happens over the course of the movie is that Elisa and the monster bond and fall in love and Elisa has to figure out how she can free him (?) from the clutches of the evil American military. One of the subplots is that the Russians are also trying to get their hands on the monster as well.

The first thing I thought as I started watching the movie was how much it looked and sounded like the 2001 French film Amelie. All the greenish tints, the music, the film's style. The film seemed so stuck in the early 2000s. Then it dawned on me as the film progressed that it was simply a hodgepodge of other films I had already seen. King Kong, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Every Tim Burton movie, La La Land, Man of Steel, and of course Amelie. By the end I wasn't impressed at all with the film.

Del Toro, like Tim Burton, seems to be trapped in an infantile landscape where everything has to look Gothic, everything is quirky and weird. His films look dated. In 20 years, I think people will look back at this film and go "Why?". Del Toro IS overrated. His films have always been mainly "ok". I've never seen the genius in his work. He isn't a Kubrick or even an Inarritu. He made Pacific Rim, for god's sake!

His sets seem as artificial as anything out of George Lucas's prequel trilogy. His characters are caricatures we've all seen hundreds of times. The weird lighting, the puke green tints straight out of 2001.

There were no original ideas here. And a lot of the ones ON display were pretty dumb.....the scene where Elisa puts a towel under her bathroom door and is somehow able to fill the entire bathroom from the floor to the ceiling with water so her and the monster can do the nasty...how is that water being held in????

Another dumb plot device was that Elisa has to wait for a canal to be opened so the creature can escape into the sea....even though the creature could have just walked to the edge of the dock and jumped into the ocean....There wasn't a fence or anything...but NO, he for some reason has to jump into the canal FIRST and wait a month for the opportunity to escape?

Really, the only thing I LIKED about the movie were the actors. The screenplay didn't give them much to work with, but they wrung as much of a performance out of as they could, with Bill Hader being the standout more than Sally Hawkins. Michael Stuhlberg as a Russian spy also did a marvelous job.

This movie is worth seeing ONCE. But like most of Del Toro's movies, I will probably never revisit it again.

My Grade: B