The Shape of Water Review

After watching the Oscars, I was excited that Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water won Best Picture. I hadn’t seen the movie at the time, but I was just excited that a science fiction movie won the award. I decided to watch it the next night and boy was I disappointed. I don’t normally agree with the movies that win Best Picture, and I’ve come to accept that. My favorite movies of the year just don’t align with what the Oscar’s have in mind, and I get that. But I didn’t find anything particularly amazing or unique about The Shape of Water, honestly, I thought it was a tale as old as time.

The shape of Water is pretty much a retrofuture/steampunk reimagining of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Its protagonist is a young, brunette girl with a specific attribute to set them apart from society (Belle with her intelligence, and Elisa being mute). Both films took place during a time period where it was difficult for women to be independent, but both characters still manage to do so. At home, they live with an older man who fails at his job (Maurice being deemed an insane inventor, and Giles not succeeding as a painter). The physically strong testosterone fueled macho man as the main antagonist. The female lead falling in love with a creature that people don’t understand and are afraid of, but in actuality, is caring and loving once you get passed the monster-like exterior.

From my understanding, there was supposed to be some enlightening realization moment at the end of the movie, where we learn Elisa is some sort of human/fish hybrid, but it felt lame, obvious, and just left us with more questions than answers. At the start of the film we see Elisa with 3 scars on each side of her neck, and my immediate reaction was “hmm, they look like gills.” We learn in the finale that The Asset “healed” her scars and turned them into gills so she could breathe underwater. First off, it was obvious from the very beginning that they were gills. 3 slits on each side of her neck? That’s way too coincidental to be just a coincidence. Secondly, that leaves us with a plethora of unanswered questions. Were her parents a fish creature and a human? Was she created in a lab? How did she get to Baltimore? Are there more amphibious monsters? The twist didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already alluded to, so it felt unnecessary.

There were a few spins put on the film to make it stand out a little, like Elisa and The Asset communicating through sign language, and the Russian spy subplot, but it still felt like the movie was just one overused trope after the other. Despite winning the award for Best Picture, The Shape of Water wasn’t anything that special, so I’m giving it a 6/10.