The film starts with an interesting premise: during the Cold War era, a US government research center has captured a strange amphibious creature and the protagonist is a mute cleaning lady. From the beginning the story overflows with symbols if intolerance: towards women, towards handicapped people, black people, amphibious people, immigrants, gays, old people, and so on and so on. It's like it's trying to check all the boxes, see how many it gets in a single row. But while it does this, the story itself just stalls. This is a two hour long movie in which nothing much happens. It shows intolerance, but doesn't go anywhere with it. Yes, we know people are assholes and that during that era, they were slightly worse than now. It does nothing for the plot, which is predictable and boring.
The bad man is reminiscent of Pan's Labyrinth villain and the main character a girl with an active imagination, but it is way slower and more poorly executed than Pan's. It is clearly a worse movie than that was. To put it mildly, I am at a loss for why this film won Best Picture. It was visually interesting, but you couldn't take it seriously. It went from metaphor to reality with no regard to the previous context. A villain that seemed to not have a purpose other than being obtuse and evil, a woman who after learning that the creature has bit two fingers off a man's hand goes near it and offers it food from her own hand, a black best friend who's only role is to gossip about her irrelevant husband, some Russian spies that seem more interested in food than in spying, the list goes on and on. It's not like the actors didn't do a good job, it's not that the direction or the sets were faulty, but the story itself was nothing more than a long slow cliche.
The bad man is reminiscent of Pan's Labyrinth villain and the main character a girl with an active imagination, but it is way slower and more poorly executed than Pan's. It is clearly a worse movie than that was. To put it mildly, I am at a loss for why this film won Best Picture. It was visually interesting, but you couldn't take it seriously. It went from metaphor to reality with no regard to the previous context. A villain that seemed to not have a purpose other than being obtuse and evil, a woman who after learning that the creature has bit two fingers off a man's hand goes near it and offers it food from her own hand, a black best friend who's only role is to gossip about her irrelevant husband, some Russian spies that seem more interested in food than in spying, the list goes on and on. It's not like the actors didn't do a good job, it's not that the direction or the sets were faulty, but the story itself was nothing more than a long slow cliche.