Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have been a fan of Guillermo del Toro for quite a while, and I absolutely loved his Hellboy movies. So when this film was not available for rent I went ahead and purchased it. Del Toro is incredibly good at making unforgettable creatures and atmospheres, and he does that again here. The problem? "The Shape of Water" is an absolutely disgusting movie. No seriously, I mean it's ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING in about every way imaginable. Abe (or at least, our Abe-like fish man) is visually stunning, but his every scene is overlaid with so many burps and gurgles that its impossible to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the film. One has a hard time enjoying a character that sounds like a toilet struggling to flush. Every interaction is a strange string of noises that try to take the place of actual acting and interaction. But this is the least of the film's atrocious crimes. Our fish man does not speak like Abe from Hellboy. He is a wild, feral beast. Del Toro instructed the actor to play him that way, and the movie reminds us on several occasions that he is a wild animal and a 'thing.' Even the good guys call him a thing. So you'd assume love would take part in this film the way it did with E.T., or Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin. You expect there to be a bonding and mutual respect, love, not sex. Well guess what - its a full blown romance movie. Maybe I should've looked at the genre before watching. This thing goes full blown bestiality. As if that weren't enough, I don't like watching small animals get killed. Trigger warning for those who don't want to see that kind of thing - its in this film. And worst of all, like so many recent films, "The Shape of Water" serves up an extra helping of over the top propaganda. It does a great job portraying the 60s visually, and sure things were different back then, but they weren't as bad as the film portrays them to be or we wouldn't be in the civilization we are today. It was this civilization that chose to keep embracing liberty - and chose not to throw all of us in camps to prevent it. So come on now...enough of this equating the 60s to the Holocaust! The film depicts white males as being complete mustachioed villains with no redeeming qualities, it portrays them as being racist, sexist, violent, cruel and Christian. The film leads the charge on the crusade to divide us of the working class based on skin color. The only good white male in the movie is homosexual and we get to watch him hit on another white male, who ends up being racist and homophobic. (And why, isnt this movie supposed to be about the main characters? Why do we need side excursions into sexuality?!) As always women are portrayed as exempt from the stigmas and labels heaped upon the white males, and they are shown to be completely oppressed by men. I'm a woman myself, and I'm saying this. I'm sorry but these stereotypes are not at all what I experienced growing up - I was taught to love my fellow man - and I'm tired of every lick of entertainment being sullied by a soap box against a by-gone era when a vast 90 percent of the people we encounter on a day to day basis are not hung up on these 'evils.' These 'evils,' by the way, that the Soros funded propaganda machine needs to keep alive in our working class brains so that we don't come together and prosper. Its a miserable movie with a lot of pointless death scenes - drama for drama's sake, and its slow paced. There's no action - this isn't a fun Hellboy romp or a mysterious Pans Labyrinth. I sincerely wish I hadn't given a dime for this garbage.