The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)

pixelburp

First trailer for Del Toro's latest work; no mistaking his style, and Doug Jones once more plays a Fish-Man in a DelToro movie

Crimson Peak was a little disappointing, and its marketing campaign I feel didn't help, pitching a very different kind of film to the one actually released.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFYWazblaUA

conor222

I saw the trailer for this last night,
Is this a Hellboy prequel based on the origin of Abe Sapien?

We were all very confused, either this is in lieu of a Hellboy 3, or it is a massive f**k you to the studios as this character has most of Abe's characteristics from the other films (classical music in the trailer, the eggs, even the look)

mikhail

conor222 wrote: »

We were all very confused, either this is in lieu of a Hellboy 3, or it is a massive f**k you to the studios as this character has most of Abe's characteristics from the other films (classical music in the trailer, the eggs, even the look)

I can't believe it's the latter. He'd lose in court in a heartbeat if the rights holders sued.

Mr E

Looks very good. It has a real Bioshock/Art Deco aesthetic.

siblers

Mr E wrote: »

Looks very good. It has a real Bioshock/Art Deco aesthetic.

It has a very strong Bioshock influence, parts of it looks like it was taken straight from the first two games, even the text used is very similar to Bioshock

The Black Oil

Very well put together trailer, imo.

Looper007

Awesome to see Sally Hawkins get a rare lead role. Definitely think this be more in the vain of his more arthouse films like The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. Del Toro goes either way for me, he's a talent for sure but is very hit and miss. Looks promising though.

JP Liz V1

Looper007 wrote: »

Awesome to see Sally Hawkins get a rare lead role. Definitely think this be more in the vain of his more arthouse films like The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. Del Toro goes either way for me, he's a talent for sure but is very hit and miss. Looks promising though.

7 Golden Globes nominations including 1 for Sally

Telecaster58

The last couple of Del Toro films have been real misfires. What might save this is the appearance of the great Michael Shannon.

Kirby

Mr E wrote: »

Looks very good. It has a real Bioshock/Art Deco aesthetic.

siblers wrote: »

It has a very strong Bioshock influence, parts of it looks like it was taken straight from the first two games, even the text used is very similar to Bioshock

The tone, the visuals, the music, even the font.....its all unmistakingly Bioshock. I hope Levine takes it as an homage.

droidman123

Check out any alex del a inglesis movies,the bar and witching and bitching,just two to start you off....way better than del toro imo

RocketRaccoon

I am surprised to see a complete lack of chatter about this, it is a month away from release here but it is available through other means now. I am really looking forward to watching it tonight.

Sad Professor

Kirby wrote: »

The tone, the visuals, the music, even the font.....its all unmistakingly Bioshock. I hope Levine takes it as an homage.

It's not like Bioshock invented art deco styling.

Anyway, Levine will have to get in line as the filmmakers of a Dutch short film called The Space Between Us are already claiming de Toro ripped them off.

Decuc500

RocketRaccoon wrote: »

I am surprised to see a complete lack of chatter about this, it is a month away from release here but it is available through other means now. I am really looking forward to watching it tonight.

Some of us still go to the cinema, which is where I'll be watching this. (And keeping away from this thread for the next month.)

pixelburp

Ah yes, it's 'screener' season; if nothing else Del Toro paints some pretty pictures and I'd prefer not to watch a low-res, watermarked version of the film out of any impatience I might have. I look forward to seeing this in the cinema on the big-screen, in all its glory.

RocketRaccoon

Decuc500 wrote: »

Some of us still go to the cinema, which is where I'll be watching this. (And keeping away from this thread for the next month.)

Sorry, I do go to the cinema weekly aswell and will most likely go to see this when it is released. My post was more about the lack of talk about this rather than the fact it was available through nefarious means.

Decuc500

RocketRaccoon wrote: »

Sorry, I do go to the cinema weekly aswell and will most likely go to see this when it is released. My post was more about the lack of talk about this rather than the fact it was available through nefarious means.

Ah yeah fair enough. I just enjoy reading about upcoming films but will stop reading the thread when people are discussing the film and return after I've seen it. Anyway, I hope it's good.

Sad Professor

I'd strongly encourage people to skip the screeners. Not just for this but for all the award films. No matter what the dopes in comment sections say, the frame rates are messed up in all of them. Frames get repeated, it's like watching a bad NTSC conversion. Idiots who leak these things don't know to encode properly or they do it badly deliberately.

There's nothing I want to see so bad that can't wait 3 months or isn't worth a trip to the cinema when it comes out here in a week or two.

darced

This post has been deleted.

smurf492

Fantastic movie... Delight to watch and absolute return to form for del toro... Makes my list of best of the year already

Space Dog

It's beautiful to look at, the score is nice, and all the actors are bringing their A-game, but it's sooo predictable. I could tell after 15 minutes how it was going to pan out. I enjoyed Crimson Peak a lot more.

Wombatman

Marvelous movie. Loved every bit of it. Performances, dialogue, sets, score, story and style pushed all my buttons. A+. Hawkins is a little gem altogether.

yerwanthere123

Watched it last night finally. Very enjoyable, but like a lot of movies that I've waited months to see I find that they're difficult to live up to the hype. I also felt like I'd seen it before, I'm sure there's a movie with a very similar plot but I can't think of what it may be. All in all very good, but doesn't feel like best picture material.

7/10.

danmanw8

It's pretty good, watched it last night. It's one of those movies you say "that was... different" after

patnor1011

Meh...

Guillermo probably scored a bullseye with this movie mainly with people who do identify themselves as mermaids, it, crossgender and whatever else is out there nowadays - by implying that most of them are simply lonely people who struggle to find the relationship they desire.
Perhaps it is just "follow the money" scenario as confused sexual identity and relationships agenda this film is about is sexy these days and could be a good feeding frenzy for social media warriors descending upon uneducated masses teaching them what is right and what not. That is itself mostly confusing as this movie was.

We certainly live in strange times when so many people do find zoophilia interesting, lovely and entertaining.

igCorcaigh

OK, I hated it.

Yes, visually very good, actors done their best, but what was the point with the stupid plot. I'm a bit iffy with del Toro anyway, but surely he could have done more with this.

Horrendous film.

igCorcaigh

patnor1011 wrote: »

Meh...

Guillermo probably scored a bullseye with this movie mainly with people who do identify themselves as mermaids, it, crossgender and whatever else is out there nowadays - by implying that most of them are simply lonely people who struggle to find the relationship they desire.
Perhaps it is just "follow the money" scenario as confused sexual identity and relationships agenda this film is about is sexy these days and could be a good feeding frenzy for social media warriors descending upon uneducated masses teaching them what is right and what not. That is itself mostly confusing as this movie was.

We certainly live in strange times when so many people do find zoophilia interesting, lovely and entertaining.

I see a lot of reviewers commenting on the current political divide and identity politics in relation to to this film. I don't get that. Maybe that was meant as a commentary, but I didn't get it. I can't imagine that if I were trans or whatever, that this movie would encapsulate my experience, no. Go watch Boys Don't Cry, but not this.

Sad Professor

patnor1011 wrote: »

Meh...

Guillermo probably scored a bullseye with this movie mainly with people who do identify themselves as mermaids, it, crossgender and whatever else is out there nowadays - by implying that most of them are simply lonely people who struggle to find the relationship they desire.
Perhaps it is just "follow the money" scenario as confused sexual identity and relationships agenda this film is about is sexy these days and could be a good feeding frenzy for social media warriors descending upon uneducated masses teaching them what is right and what not. That is itself mostly confusing as this movie was.

We certainly live in strange times when so many people do find zoophilia interesting, lovely and entertaining.

Sometimes a movie about a woman falling in love with a fish man is just a movie about a woman falling in love with a fish man.

igCorcaigh

Sad Professor wrote: »

Sometimes a movie about a woman falling in love with a fish man is just a movie about a woman falling in love with a fish man.

Put so much more eloquently than I could.

yerwanthere123

patnor1011 wrote: »

Meh...

Guillermo probably scored a bullseye with this movie mainly with people who do identify themselves as mermaids, it, crossgender and whatever else is out there nowadays - by implying that most of them are simply lonely people who struggle to find the relationship they desire.
Perhaps it is just "follow the money" scenario as confused sexual identity and relationships agenda this film is about is sexy these days and could be a good feeding frenzy for social media warriors descending upon uneducated masses teaching them what is right and what not. That is itself mostly confusing as this movie was.

We certainly live in strange times when so many people do find zoophilia interesting, lovely and entertaining.

Wtf?

igCorcaigh

yerwanthere123 wrote: »

Wtf?

I know, right? But see some of the imdb reviews. This film is all about liberals bashing the oppressed straight white man. Apparently.

pixelburp

Sad Professor wrote: »

Sometimes a movie about a woman falling in love with a fish man is just a movie about a woman falling in love with a fish man.

The movie's not even out yet and the thread's already gone nuts.

I'm not sure what's worse: people cramming identity politics into otherwise trivial matters, or people believing that identity politics has been crammed into something trivial. It's like some tedious, cognitive Sophie's Choice

youngblood

When I heard the basic plot for the movie I wondered if I had heard or seen it before?
I know he directed Hellboy, was there a similar plot of a woman falling for a fishguy in tank??? (didnt find that movie very memorable, hence the question!)

Mr Crispy

No romance, but there was a fishguy in a tank, yes.

david75

Did nobody watch Til the end?

She was a fish woman to begin with. Her gills open up in the end. You see them and hear them commented on as scratches behind her ears.

expectationlost

didn't buy the romance/lust wasn't enough time spent developing that

homerun_homer

I was pretty disappointed with this, again I think hype hurts it. The performances are all very good, it looks great, though the merman does primarily look like most thing Guillermo creates that Doug Jones plays and distractedly looks simply like a man in a suit.

The romance element wasn't dealt with very well in the story.

She teaches him sign language for egg, the next time she's playing music and falling in love with him.

I knew that Octavia Spencer on the Off the Record podcast said she told her agent "no more cleaning lady roles" and refused to read the script but was pestered that this part was different. I was expecting more out of her part as a result,

it just seemed to just amount to her last scene where she gives out to the husband. Big deal.

The Russian plot , Michael Shannon's motivation and everything just seems to be cluster-f**ked into the film and none of it entirely plays out to a satisfactory conclusion.

Maybe it was my mood going in to it, I've had a very crap week. I enjoyed it enough to be distracted but it's not a patch on the overall quality and the emotion you get from watching Pan's Labyrinth. I wanted this film to give me a dose of the feels but it didn't.

Fysh

Pan's Labyrinth it is not, but I suspect we're not going to get a film of that depth and calibre from Del Toro again any time soon, not least because the sorts of budgets he is working with now don't really allow for it.

I found myself enjoying this a lot more than I might have expected to, given what happens and how it plays out. But the tone of it felt like it was quite strongly channeling Mood Indigo-mode Michel Gondry, which worked for me.

In terms of pacing, there's a clunky shift around the halfway mark that corresponds to a plot element that would ordinarily have been the culmination of the plot, but it does at least mean the narrative isn't quite as predictable as it could otherwise have been.

I thought it was definitely an improvement on Crimson Peak, in that that was a gorgeous looking film that was let down by a clumsy script (failing utterly at the subtlety of its gothic horror inspirations) as well as being distracted visually by the pointless "ghost" plot strand. The Shape Of Water looks gorgeous and feels, to me, tonally consistent. Though I won't lie - it could do with losing maybe 10 minutes or so, and the opening voiceover isn't bad but feels somewhat unnecessary...

johnny_ultimate

I wish I liked this more than I did. I love the production & creature design, the core concept, and some of the ideas in it. The fairy tale part of it is potent, and I appreciated how many of its characters each represented the sort of social & political conflicts that were playing out in 1960s America (del Toro only occasionally puts too fine a point on it). Sally Hawkins is obviously incredible, and the likes of Jenkins, Stuhlbarg and Spencer are equally capable of carrying much of the film. It opens strong, some of the motifs are used very effectively (eggs and bathtubs in particular), and there's definitely some striking moments littered throughout.

But I think the biggest problem was the way it wanted to be several films at once. A surprising amount of the film is dedicated to the thriller-aspects and Michael Shannon's character, which are the least interesting parts of the whole thing (

well, alongside the Russian subplot

). Shannon is a obviously an immensely talented chap, but he's typecast here and he has nothing to challenge himself with. A consequence of the heavy focus on

finding / hiding the merman

I think takes a whole lot of screentime away from the relationship between the merman and Elisa, which means that the emotional beats don't hit as powerfully as they should. I mean, efficiency is a virtue and affecting stories can be told in 15-20 minutes, but there were too many things competing for screentime here, IMO to the determent of its beating heart. Its homages and references to classic cinema were effective for the most part, but it dipped into empty pastiche with its

IMO misjudged musical number

.

So yeah, every time I got swept up by its lovely design (the laboratory itself must be one of the finest sets in recent memory, and del Toro capturing a bit of that Bioshock film that hasn't been made yet) there was often a sense it wasn't quite the film it could've been.

sporina

Just saw this today - not a big fantasy fan but had to see Sally Hawkins having watched and loved Maudie - she was class.. though minus the violence and nudity it could be a kids movie.. not that that would be a bad thing.. its like a fairytale.. (well thats my take on it anyway)
Loved the set design.. v cute

Ajsoprano

I’d give the Oscar to this one out of the nominees. Magical.

sporina

Ajsoprano wrote: »

I’d give the Oscar to this one out of the nominees. Magical.

well i am all about Frances McD but I wouldn't mind if she lost it to Sally..

Hrududu

Yikes, nowhere near as good as I was expecting. I enjoyed the first half but felt it took a real dive in quality for the second half.

I couldn't buy into the romance aspect at all and was just skeeved by it.

Positives: I really rate Sally Hawkins and thought she was terrific in this. I also thought Richard Jenkins was very good too. And for the first hour I really enjoyed the pace and the tone

Negatives: I may be in the minority but I've always found Michael Shannon to be terrible in anything I've ever seen him in. And it was no different here. He always seems like he's in a much hammier version of the film to everyone else

Banjaxed82

Disappointed. Boiling it down to a love story, I just didn't buy it. Couldn't engage with it. The relationship felt contrived and the emotion unearned.

Some lovely flourishes as always with del Toro but this is getting way over hyped. Not a patch on Pan's Labyrinth. Now that's a film that deserves to win best picture.

Goodshape

Was expecting a bit more from this.

I think I'll revisit it again in 6 - 12 months time, as it may just be a victim of too much award-season hype, but at the moment it was enjoyable, lovely, but in no way as impactful or wonderful as I had wanted.

El Duda

The Shape of the Water - 9/10

Despite the 13 Oscar nominations, I was very cautious going into this as I have read a large amount of user reviews suggesting that this is a potentially underwhelming film. Not only that, but Del Toro's previous work Crimson Peak was an impressive but ultimately lackluster affair.

Perhaps cautious expectations had an impact but I thoroughly enjoyed this film and was completely sold on the central relationship between Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and 'The Creature'. I found it to be incredibly moving and beautiful. It tugged at my heartstrings in a very odd way.

All of the main, likable characters deal with themes of isolation & loneliness and the film has a great sense of melancholy as it touches on subjects like racism, homophobia and misogyny.

Michael Shannon is a menacing choice of villain and he very much suits the 50's B-movie aesthetic. He is a little one dimensional but I feel he is an intentional throwback to 1950's horror/noir.

This is an absolutely gorgeous looking film and the cinematography and production design are stunning. Every frame is a work of art. The tone is ethereal and other-worldly and full of pathos. It is just a spectacularly cinematic film and worthy of all the awards recognition it is getting. Weird and wonderful.

Rjd2

A slightly indie version of beauty and the beast with Michael Shannon delivering the same performance he has his whole career, I genuinely think without him we could have something more interesting than we got such as more time for the couple, but alas not to be. Its all very rushed sadly.

It looks lovely, but considering the hype, its a serious let down despite Hawkins who is fantastic in this.


5/10.

BoroMan32

Disappointing.

Starts off with a lovely 'Amelie' type quirky vibe to it and it just descends into a lazy love story.

igCorcaigh

BoroMan32 wrote: »

Disappointing.

Starts off with a lovely 'Amelie' type quirky vibe to it and it just descends into a lazy love story.

I thought so too. Started off well, but then, what a stupid mess. Any initial artistry got quagmired in absurd smooze.

Very disappointing.

My rating: don't waste your time.

HandsomeBob

As an ensemble it's marvellous, the only blight being Shannon being strangely typecast though it did fit here. I really enjoyed Stuhlberg's and Jenkins' turns in particular though of course the film belongs to Hawkins and Jones.

The story is at its best when focusing on the beast's nature (intelligent being, simple savage or god, or all of the above?). There is a predictability but it's inconsequential, as the film is ultimately about a romance that never comes across as overbearing, patronising or too cool for school. A rarity in Hollywood and in film in general.

Drumpot

I Thought it was a lovely adult, feel good movie, as did my wife. I wonder how much Oscar nominations make some people more critical of certain movies!