Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: The Shape of Water

[quote name="Rafiki"]A lonely mute befriends another species and then has sex with it in her apartment. 4 stars! I guess this was supposed to be a movie with Deep Meaning about diversity and acceptance and so forth. There's a brief scene about halfway through the movie where a black couple and a gay guy get bigoted out of a diner, and that's supposed to make you go hand to chin and see how the plight of the fish man is no different. However, without that scene the movie would be like a million others you've seen where something non-human is held captive by the evil government/science lab/corporation/whatever and someone sympathizes with it enough to risk trying to free it. It also doesn't help that we're supposed to see it as no different than the blacks and the gays, but then Mutey befriends fishman like a wild animal instead of a person. She offers it eggs to coax it into coming near and learning to trust her. Did you ever toss pieces of burrito to your new Mexican neighbors in ever shorter distances from yourself so that they would get closer and closer and more comfortable with your presence until they trusted you as a friend? Of course you didn't because that's fucking stupid and degrading. I mean, the fish guy is clearly an intelligent being, but it's not characterized as being on the level of a person which makes attempted parallels to oppressed minorities fall completely flat. This movie is more like Project X, if Matthew Broderick took the apes home and fucked them first. There's a Russian subplot for no particular reason. There's a subplot about artistic skill falling to the wayside in favor of technological advances for no particular reason. It's pretty much instantly understood that Michael Shannon's character is an asshole, but the movie continues to lay it on so thick it even included a pointless sex scene with his wife just to illustrate he's even a brute <i>in bed!</i> There's a stock hard-ass military general cliché character. Instead of the "WE'VE GOTTA WEAPONIZE IT" guy, it's the "the only good anything is a dead anything," guy. The movie does have good performances and style, I'll give it that.[/quote]