The Shape of Water 2017

Like:
- Beautiful Cinematography and Editing as with every Del Toro Movie
- Solid Character acting by all members of the cast
- Memorable OST

Dislike:
- Plot was rushed at places and was highly predictable
- The movie did not quite capture me the way I expected it to comming from movies such as Pan’s Labyrinth
- The creature, knowing how hard it was to design, felt a bit too bland for me. It needed more texture.
- I would have loved to see more creature backstory

Plot Complexity:
Easy

Flow: (Act 1, 2, 3)
Good in places and rushed at others

Movie Facts:
When The Shape of Water (2017) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017, the screening was held in the Elgin Theatre. The interior scenes of the theater in the film were shot in the Elgin Theatre, so as the audience was watching the film, they were seeing the same theater on screen that they were sitting in.

Awards/Oscars:
Won 4 Oscars: Best Achievement in Directing, Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score), Best Achievement in Production Design

Memorable Quotes:
When he looks at me, the way he looks at me... He does not know, what I lack... Or - how - I am incomplete. He sees me, for what I - am, as I am. He's happy - to see me. Every time. Every day. Now, I can either save him... or let him die.

This is just fine. As is always the case with Del Toro, this film is beautiful to look at. Just taking in the eye candy of any Del Toro effort makes it worth watching. The look of the "gillman" is another highlight. Michael Shannon plays a nasty villain very well. And I think that's about where the certain positives end for me.

Richard Strickland (Shannon) is a power-hungry, sexual harasser and rapist. And gosh! He's a mean boss, too. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about him, not even as a father. The U.S. Military and the Soviet spies are portrayed with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. I get it. We're talking Cold War here. But the only way the viewer could have been more instructed to hate certain characters would have been to hang "Bad Guy" signs around their necks.

I've considered this film as nothing more than a fairy tale and ignored any possible metaphors. Could this be nothing more than a story of love and hate? Am I so cynical and conditioned to look for heavy-handed messages that I can't enjoy a film that may be without an agenda?

My single certainty about "The Shape of Water" is the reason it was given the Academy Award for Best Picture. It worships Hollywood. Particularly Richard Jenkins, the lonely next door neighbor. He is romanticizing the glories of the Movies continually. Later, the gillman is found in a movie theater, enraptured with the big screen. Del Toro seems to be sucking up to the glories of past movie-makers. It may have been unintentional, but the Oscar voters certainly appreciated it.

[8.1/10] Guillermo Del Toro finally has his Edward Scissorhands. The writer-director likes to paint his characters in primary colors, so the good guys are oh so good, kind, and innocent. The bad guys racist, sexist and cruel. And the world can be divided into those who can appreciate the beauty and humanity in something different from them and those who would rather kill it than let it fall into enemy hands.

But therein lies the heartening core of The Shape of Water which borrows from Tim Burton’s 1990 classic the same sense of a peculiarity disrupting the rhythms of nominally idyllic period-era Americana, the same sense of myopic antagonists who want to destroy what they don’t understand, and the same sense of soul in finding common cause among oddballs who fall outside the norm, whether they have blades, hairpieces, or gills.

The film is, like so many of both Del Toro’s and Burton’s films, a paean to those oddballs, to the people who don’t fit with the expectations or demands of the time in which they live, but still deserve the same dignity and compassion that anyone does. The Shape of Water isn't shy about drawing the line (or rather, exposing the line) between the well-coiffed, supercilious men who run the show and threaten to stomp on anything not to their liking, and the people who fall outside of the “decent” life and nuclear family du jour.

But those people are the film’s heroes. There is Elisa, the film’s hero, who is mute and gets by with the help of her friends. There is Giles, her neighbor who struggles to earn a living painting pictures of happy families that an older, closeted gay man like him is excluded from. There is Zelda, Elisa’s coworker who also does the cleaning at the government laboratory where they both work. There’s Dr. Hoffstetler, the Soviet spy who disobeys in handlers because he values sentient life.

And then there’s the creature himself, who’s never given a name, but is the cause of all the fuss in The Shape of Water. Some sort of amphibious fish man, Del Toro standby Doug Jones steps into the prosthetics once again to portray “the asset”, a being worshipped as a god in South America, but dragged in chains by the United States military to a place where he’s imprisoned, tortured, and treated as an inherently inferior.

What these people all have in common is that they go unseen by the people who better fit the mores and standards of American society. You only see it on the margins, but the film is set at a time when social change was challenging the notion that the post-war peace was a utopian time in the history of the United States. The Shape of Water, then, choose to shine its spotlight on the people who were ill-served by those times: people of color, people with disabilities, people with different sexual orientations, and more.

Again, Del Tero isn’t subtle about this. The most heavy-handed moment in a film not short on them is delivered from General Hoyt, a walking representation of American decider-ism, giving a speech to Colonel Strickland, the film’s antagonist, about how thin the line between “decency” and being kicked out of the club is. And Strickland, a rather onenote villain in the beginning, gains strength and dimension as Michael Shannon turns on the intensity, but also reveals the character’s desperation not to be sent away from the American Dream, a dream only available to people who look like him, but nevertheless elusive and so easily lost.

Despite those stakes, and the streak of brutality that runs through what Del Toro himself describes as a fairy tale, The Shape of Water is also a funny, heartfelt film. The exchanges between earnest Elisa and the perpetually flustered and motor-mouthed Giles, the amusing yarns and smart remarks from Zelda, and barely heard exchanges from Russian spies shouted at one another all make the movie one with plenty of laughs amid its grander ambitions.

It’s also unquestionably warm despite a certain amount of blood and bodily harm. There is solace that these oddballs find in one another. Part of what makes Burton’s ouvre so present to me when watching this film the devotion to the camaraderie of the misfit toys. The friendship, the shared struggle but also shared joys of Elisa and her allies, buoys the film in even its darker stretches.

The same is true for the romance. You’d have to be Troy McClure for a romantic relationship between a human woman and an amphibious sea creature to seem natural, but Del Toro lets you buy into not only the affection, but the rapture of finding someone who can understand you, even if they come from somewhere very different. This is where the director’s magical realism most seeps into the film, with flooded bathrooms and healing touches and hidden talents that suggest across continents, societies, and species, these two souls were made for one another. The impressionistic fantasy sequence, where the pair enjoy the classical romance of black and white films that so many are chasing, is a testament to Del Toro’s ability to find sweetness and intimacy in unusual places.

And yet the film comes down to that same conflict. It sets Strickland, as the avatar for a myopic us vs. them self-certainty used to hold people like Elisa down, against the combined efforts of her cohort to set the creature free. Along the way there are casualties, and pain inflicted, and bizarre unravelings that raise the tension and heighten the catharsis. And it’s all set within a backdrop of sea greens and blues -- the shades of which are repeatedly noted in the film -- that uses color and tone to visually connect the world above to the briny deep below.

It’s a world apart from the perfect suburban life that Strickland is chasing after, a life that has no understanding of, let alone a place for, something like the creature. That’s the key to The Shape of Water. Del Toro isn’t subtle, but he uses his fish man as a litmus test for the soul, a way to see whether in the troubled times of the Cold War and competing ways of life it brought with, you can recognize the glimmer of a soul in someone like you. For those who can, Del Toro offers grace and redemption, and for those who can’t, he offers only the ignoble ends they would otherwise impose on those who don’t match their own limited view of what’s right, normal, and fair.

I had pretty high hopes for this film which were, unfortunately, not quite met.

The plot felt crowded, with too many side stories that were never fully explored and didn't contribute much (if anything) to the main plot. Almost every story aspect of this movie felt unfinished. It's as though they took the plot of a TV series and decided to keep every detail for the movie despite not having nearly enough screen time to to explore all the different topics.
In spite of this, I still found the general story line entertaining and enjoyed the implications the side plots had on the overarching story, even if those themes ended up feeling underutilised.

The cinematography however was absolutely amazing. Every shot was beautiful. I don't even have the words to describe how exquisite the cinematography on this film was. I honestly would watch the whole thing again on mute just to see how beautifully crafted the scenes are.

My biggest gripe with the film was the scene where Elisa is trying to express how much the creature means to her and forgoes signing to attempt to vocally tell him. I felt it underplayed a huge aspect of her character - that she felt "incomplete" for being mute. Considering that Elisa had emotionally expressed herself using sign language earlier in the film, it makes no sense to not let her use sign language to express her feeling of love. It honestly felt quite ableist to refuse a mute character the ability to express such intense emotions using sign language. The singing and dancing segment that it transitioned into also felt wildly out of place. Sure, we see Elisa and Giles watch similar scenes on Giles' TV and we can see how the open display of affection is a cause of interest/jealousy for Elisa, but at no other point in the film did we stray from the character's reality to their fantasy. Had they committed to using Elisa's imagination as a way to express her emotions and included multiple scenes where we see how she envisions herself in her own head, then this particular scene would have been a very significant insight into the relationship. In my opinion, the scene should never have made it into the draft, let alone the final cut.

I think I've figured out Guillermo Del Toro, or at least, what I love and hate about his films. They're gorgeous, stylish, sensual, passionate, and beautifully crafted, but ultimately fall short in the script department. This is a trend I've had with every single one of his movies, including Pan's Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, Pacific Rim, and now The Shape Of Water. In my opinion, this is his best work to date. It's the most emotional I've gotten watching one of his pieces. Sally Hawkins is what absolutely sells this picture, above the retro aesthetic and whimsical music. Her performance is what makes the story believable, not to say the other cast don't give it their all. This is one of the best performances, if not THE best performance to come out of last year. She is so believable, it took my breath away at some pivotal scenes, I'm not kidding. That's what I admire about Del Toro's movies above a lot of others, is the clear passion that's being put in behind the scene. Even for some of his lesser-good projects, I can't hate them.

What makes The Shape Of Water just fall a little flat to me, which others may not find a problem with at all, is some scenes feel too short and underdeveloped. I understand this is a fairy tale and the entire story is supposed to be strictly about Hawkins and her fall for the unnamed creature, but then, why are some characters, small side characters mind you, given in-depth back-stories and entire scenes, when the outcome has little to no effect from them? There's a Russian side-plot that has a major effect on the story, but we don't get to know really much about what their intentions are, outside of Michael Shannon's character giving them the creature. I'm not saying we need an intricate explanation or anything, but there are a couple scenes with the Russians that have little weight in the overall picture, making the thread feel loose. Then, the montage of Hawkins interacting with the creature in the lab also feels just a tad short. Believe me, it's a positive when I say I wanted to see more. There's one scene and a montage with the two of them connecting, and then before we know it, she has to get the creature out or the Russians will take him. This is also where the movie falls into James Cameron's Avatar-levels of emotional manipulation. Michael Shannon's character is a occasionally comically evil, to the point where my brain got disconnected from being engrossed in the love story, and I said, "...why is he doing this?" The movie seriously relies on the audience being one-hundred percent sucked into the relationship with Hawkins and the creature, for you to buy every single plot point. This works most of the time, but others it's a big stretching it. I understand, it's a fairy-tale, the movie even starts and ends with a narration, but I feel it needs to still be believable within the confines of that set-up, especially with the serious moments come up. There's this one part, where Hawkins starts singing, and it's this big moment, because this is the first time she's made a sound the whole movie, but then, the scene doesn't work for me, 'cause it's not her voice singing and the dance-number is too short and silly for me to take seriously. I can clearly pick-up what he was doing, but those few elements deflated the tension.

The film still works, despite all that. I give Del Toro all my respect and admiration, his love for this project is all over this movie. I just wish another, longer draft was considered when filming. I still highly recommend you go watch it, there's plenty to appreciate, even if it's muddled up in a weird and short-lived bubble of happiness.

In this unusual mesh of fantasy, romance and science fiction, a mute woman working as a lab custodian in the late 60s falls for an abused, captive sea monster. It dons many hats, several at the same time, which distract and compete for attention: that central relationship, the military's plans for the creature, a neighbor's quest to reclaim his job with an ad agency, a coworker's marriage, a supervisor's frustrated home life. Each adds a layer to the onion skin, and color to the world, but ultimately they feel like light diversions from the main course.

On a technical level, it's exceptional. Guillermo del Toro's work has never been short on conceptual know-how, and The Shape of Water merely continues his habit of one-upping the preceding film. The beast itself, heavily influenced by The Creature from the Black Lagoon with a hint or two of Abe Sapien from del Toro's Hellboy, looks fantastic. Lifelike and expressive, it's easy to buy into as a thinking, feeling participant in the story. Sally Hawkins is wonderful as the human lead, drawing inspiration from dozens of classic silent films in her flourishing role as a mousey, passionate, eloquent young woman. Set designs, too, are distinct and remarkable, from the slimy, clinical confines of the military science lab to her crusty, crumbling apartment just above an active movie theater.

The plot drags, though, and more than once edges awfully close to cliche. I enjoyed it, particularly on a thematic level, but I wish it was about twenty minutes shorter.

An enjoyable film.

The story is set in 1960s, where a janitor working at a secret lab finds herself creating a bond with a mistreated and misunderstood creature.

The mute janitor establishes a relationship with this creature mainly because of what I think is the way the creature looks at her, which is referred in the trailer,

'When he looks at me, the way he looks at me. He does not know what I lack or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am, as I am.'

Of course being mute is no fun, and I imagine most people would always look different at you, but not this creature accordingly to our janitor, Elisa Esposito.

There are some mild sexual/nude scenes which might shock the viewer if you're watching It with your family, but overall the film provides the viewer a good time.

This is a really good film , I thought the cinematography was well executed, It really created a good atmosphere, and on top of that, what really stood out for me was the production design, and the film's music.

Guilhermo Del Toro doesn't disappoint, great film director.
If you dind't watch the film, go and watch It, I highly recommend It.

In the end, despite the reams of text written about The Shape of Water, it would appear that del Toro has made a simple love story, albeit between an amphibious humanoid and Sally Hawkins, but at the beating heart of it all, it is a simple love story.

Stylistically directed and shot the film very much reminded me of The City of Lost Children and similar Jeunet output. This is no bad thing and gives the film an air of fairytale despite the real-world setting. Like that French director’s films del Toro does not allow the saccharine to creep in too far and this film, like all his other outputs is filled with some unsavoury characters and involve sex and real death with all the messy details.

We do get a clear line of black and white hats, with Stuhlbarg’s character being a dark shade of grey, and having a noble motivation, whilst Michael Shannon being Michael Shannon does very well in a role that could have been said to be one-dimensional. He gives Strickland a scary motivation that most viewers could not agree with but could understand but he definitely has a hat that says ‘Bad Guy – hate me’.

Sally Hawkins effortlessly plays a non-speaking role to such a skilled and nuanced effect that I genuinely forgot for long periods her character is mute. Ably supported by Octavia Spencer and the sublime Richard Jenkins who plays the type of character that he has made his own over the years the film is in good hands.

Guillermo del Toro has often made films about being an outsider and being the ‘different’ one and here has turned the dial up to ‘eleven’ on this theme. You can’t be more outside than a ‘gill-man’ but then he throws into the mix Octavia Spencer as a poorly treated black cleaner with a work-shy husband, a mute orphan girl and a sensitive and lonely gay man. You’d have to be tone-deaf to not see his message.

Whilst others might baulk or see this message being pushed as unsubtle or ‘PC’ it has to be said in this day and age there are plenty of other films taking an altogether different message to the masses. Admittedly they won’t have the stellar cast or acting that del Torro gets but they are there. I did not see this as particularly anti-American or PC but it just says ‘be nice’ when you boil it right down. If you don’t agree with this simple message well….

This film gave me pleasure in watching it and equally nearly as much when I read some utterly foaming at the mouth reviews on IMDB. I thought people like me were supposed to be snowflakes? It’s just a film calm down. It won’t change anyone’s views that are not already entrenched.

The Shape of Water is a very modern fairy-tale about love and hate and like all good, violent and sexy fairytales in the end love wins…just.