Del Toro's Majesty and Grandeur: The (Odd) Shape of Water

Movie Reviewed: The Shape of Water

Director: Guillermo Del Toro

Date: 21 July 2018

jamesintexas rating: ***



Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water has an assured quality in its storytelling, a loving hand which offers homages to The Creature from the Black Lagoon and other touchstones of Del Toro's cinematic life, and its weird assortment of creatures, human and non, make it one of the most unusual films of the year.  It did not move me, and writing about it in July after it won Best Picture means that the film has taken on a life of its own.  It is a phenomena of creativity.

Mute janitor Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works alongside Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer) in a secret 1960's lab run by autocrat Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), and one night after seeing a bloodied Strickland emerge sans fingers from the lab, Elisa begins to communicate with the creature that is kept chained up in a pool, the remover of those fingers, an amphibious gilled-creature (Doug Jones).  Elisa starts a burgeoning friendship with the creature, and she begins to fantasize about rescuing him from his torture at the hands of the government, including Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) who offers a more humane way to treat him opposed to Strickland's ferocity.  To do anything of this magnitude, Elisa would need help from her artistic neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), himself an outcast of sorts because of his hidden sexuality. Strickland's harassment of Elisa in addition to his authoritarian control over the creature and the lab lead to an inevitable showdown of sorts. The film is about being outcast because of ability, race, sexual orientation, and even politics, and Del Toro lovingly shoots it with attention to the blues and yellows of neon, the windows on the bus Elisa takes to work where she traces the raindrops.

The film works best with Hawkins and Jones marvelously playing off of each other, or Hawkins and Spencer, or Hawkins and Jenkins.  Sally Hawkins really shines, making Elisa a compelling and dramatic figure.  What troubled me was so much time spent by Del Toro on and with Strickland.  Michael Shannon is a fine actor giving a fine performance, yet the amount of screen time given to him in the second half of the film undercuts the power of Hawkins and Jones.  And, it does not lead to any greater understanding of him, any epiphany, or any denouement that seems worthy of the amount of time spent with him.  Del Toro is sure to include scenes of Strickland's viciousness and also his insecurity with his superiors, especially with him being a veteran.  I guess that I just don't think the shape of the script matches the grandeur of Del Toro's images.  But to see the creature watching a film in the old-fashioned style of theater with water dripping from Elisa's underwater apartment above is a special moment.  What an odd choice of film to be enshrined forever in the public consciousness as a Best Picture!  I think I would always prefer Pan's Labyrinth over this film, but Del Toro delivers his own unique vision in his own unique way.

Pacific Rim Shot: Del Toro Gets Lost

Movie Review: Pacific Rim

Director: Guillermo Del Toro

Reviewed: 13 December 2013

jamesintexas rating-- *

Giant monsters fighting giant robots. What's not to like? Actually quite a bit. A disappointment on nearly all levels, Pacific Rim misfires by failing to craft a story worthy of its premise. Every time monsters appear on the scene like misshapen dinosaurs and dragons, the film displays some ferocious imagination. Every time the monsters disappear, the film grinds to a complete halt.

A portal created in the open ocean floor allows the beasts to travel between dimensions, launching a furious war upon humanity that dissolves countries and borders, rallying the planet together in its own self-preservation. The only way to fight these monsters involves two pilots stationed inside a giant robot doing something called a mind-meld neural handprint where they share a consciousness and control the robot's movements. Then, the robot gets dropped into the ocean near the monster, and they fight.

Idris Elba plays Stacker, the leader of the resistance. Charlie Day plays nerdy scientist Dr. Newton. Charlie Hunman is our charisma-less protagonist Raleigh. Rinko Kikuchi is the mysterious Mako. No one stands out in a positive way here. There are humorless scenes in the giant compound as the robots are maneuvered and improved. A lot of scenes. Too many scenes. It is kind of like watching The Empire Strikes Back and spending nearly all of the movie in the Hoth Compound, updating the speeders for the cold, training tauntauns and worrying about an impending attack. In that film, it establishes atmosphere and character and moves on to the AT-AT attack scenes (in daylight). Here, Del Toro dwells in this workshop realm which is visually uninteresting and distracts from the main event. This movie needed more fights and less talking.

Del Toro films many of the fight scenes in the dark in major cities, with the robots hurtling ships at the bad guys in addition to shooting missiles at them. The dark obscures some of the good stuff, but the fights can mostly be followed. I think the logic of the film is lacking at times. Why wouldn't fighter jets with missiles and bombs be more precise? Is humanity's best option a clunky, obvious target just asking to be knocked over? Additionally, the computers in the robots seem to fail quite a bit, a precarious situation with the robots fighting in and around so much water. Hearing characters scream about neural handshakes over and over again is not compelling, and the film just never generates any momentum.

Del Toro made Pan's Labyrinth, one of my favorite films of the last decade, so my hopes were high, but despite some nasty-looking monsters and a few fun fights, this movie is completely forgettable and a colossal waste of time and money.