Guillermo del Toro's works relied on comic books, especially the Hellboy, Pacific Rim, and Blade 2. Water forms are more similar to his art-house movies: The Devil's Backbone, Chronos, and his masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth.
This movie is a great work. It has a remarkable cinematography by Danish vocals Dan Laustsen (who works with del Toro in Mimic and Crimson Peak), a very detailed production design in detail by Paul D. Austerberry, and an extraordinary atmosphere by Alexandre Desplat.
It strives for the quality of dreams of La Late et la Bete Cocteau, the simplicity of ET Spielberg and the paranoid Cold War mindsets of the 1950s monster movies, especially The Creature From The Black Lagoon. It prints references to movies - lots of musical comedies - from earlier eras, especially the 1930s and 1940s.
Most critics shout with joy as they follow all the tonal dissonance and recognize some movie references, but not me.
I was slightly delayed by tonal imbalance. Graphic violence, nudity, beheadings, and explicit sexual acts are interspersed with pleasant feelings that evoke other women-centered fantasies, especially Jean-Pierre Jeunet with Amelie's sweetness. A cute romance and extreme brutality can not sit together easily.
I can also select many holes in the plot. I know this is a magical realism, but it is set against a bleak, realistic background. It's hard to know why two cleaners are allowed unimpeded access to the creature, and it's strange that security cameras are positioned so poorly that inexperienced people, not especially intelligent people can adversely affect the escape. Why is there maximum security anywhere except around the creature?
There is no depth or complexity in any of the characters, which is why I find the awarding of Oscar nominations to some cast members highly questionable, as efficient as the performances.
But the main problem is The Shape of Water is not a fantasy movie that evokes an imaginary world or old films; this is part of the 21st century propaganda. Not good if you consider the message.
The Water Form was set in 1962 Baltimore, at the height of the Cold War. The main culprit of the thing is a US government agent called Strickland, played with extraordinary ferocity by Michael Shannon, whose hypocrisy is compounded by the fact that he can pass for the Frankenstein monster without makeup.
He likes to use his electric livestock on them, he thinks underneath. He called it "Alabama howdy-doo", a clear reference to the southern police beating civil rights protesters around the same period. In case we miss the point, del Toro shows the police beating protesters in the background, on TV.
It also explains that Strickland is a patriot, a Christian, a racist, and a committed employee of the American military industrial complex, personified in the film by a rock-faced General (Nick Searcy) who agrees with Strickland that aliens should be protected, rather than understood. Aliens, you see, it's all dangerous and must be destroyed, in line with what del Toro clearly considers as US policy in the early sixties. John F. Kennedy, who was President between 1961 and 1963.
The characters who empathize with the aliens and want to know him better are all from the oppressed minorities. Poor Eliza (Sally Hawkins) has a low social status because she has a Mexican name, disabled and sexually abused by Strickland because she is female and mute (we see from her home life and hear from her own mouth that she does not like the woman who answers it back).
Eliza's friend (Octavia Spencer) is a victim because she is black and therefore confined to harsh cleaning tasks, and because she is married to a good-no-no-nothing man, whose darkness should make her good, but as the final scene showing him too cowardly to stand up for white oppression and therefore hardly black at all.
Another Eliza friend is her gay neighbor (Richard Jenkins), who has been fired from her job as a commercial artist either because she is old or because she is gay, and can not even reach the man she hopes to be gay as well because of repressive laws and homophobia (comfortable, there is a barman who neatly represents not only homophobia but racism).
Another good man is a socialist immigrant scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg), whose instinct as a "alien" is to help the creature, but is rejected by the Soviet official for whom he is spying - more than heterosexual masculine, white, male movies ask us to fear and hate. At one point, this nice guy killed an American soldier guarding the creature, but hey ... give the guy a break. He kills for progressive reasons.
When I see the movie on public playback, some viewers come out. My guess is that they were postponed by prominent women who were masturbating in the bathroom and by cliché characters, who were meant to be archetypes but came across as stereotypes. Or they might just be bored.
They may also be distracted by the sympathy of filmmakers who are obviously to be animalistic. In a sequence of movie fantasy - though you can argue that the whole movie is a fantasy - the leading lady we found her voice and took part in a Hollywood musical comedy dance with her suspicious friend, who turned into a sort of Fred Astaire amphibian. If this sounds a bit ridiculous compared to magic, it is. It's meant to have a similar sequence charm on The Artist, but it reminds me of monsters trying to sing Puting at the Ritz, at Young Frankenstein, Hey, maybe it's just me who is not sensitive, or has a sense of humor
I think what most alienates me is how didaktiknya this film. I am afraid that the del Toro, which I really like when I meet him, has succumbed to the temptation of political truth. Film fans will claim it is a harmless, romantic fantasy, like a child; but its political purpose is clear enough - to make the audience feel superior about their progressive modern prejudices and turn to anyone with conservative values.
In other words, it is conspicuously not liberal in its liberalism. Maybe Guillermo has been in Hollywood too long. The best image of 2017? This is certainly one of the most handsome, but I think it won an Oscar for Film and Best Director especially because it told the Academy Awards voters what he wanted to hear.