Ridiculously fake and superficial: were you fooled by it?

Rating: 1/10 (16 March 2018)

1. So, she's mute and we are being manipulated immediately by this fake plot construct: it's to get us interested in her because the director hasn't the skill to impart "inner life" to the character.
2. The skin-deep inner life that is displayed - her love for the evocative innocence in the movies is a lie. It's fake, just another manipulative plot construct as it's just to get us back to the 1950s where people so much more disliked people other than themselves that they could treat the creature this nasty way.
3. As if today, people don't hate "the other" where laws in states across the U.S. are being rolled back to allow prejudice, drone bombings have so much more recently killed indiscriminately anyone nearby. No, you don't have to hide in the 1950s to show intolerant people. (Or the long-gone Spanish Civil War.)
4. By being in the 1950s, the director can also hide his superficial, vacuous filmmaking behind a glossy veneer as if that's content.
5. The creature is a total non-entity - in more ways than one, surface only.
6. Woman doesn't only sympathise with its plight - no, way too boring, that won't bring the crowds in to see the movie. No, she's got to fall in love with it. Still not enough! Right, she's got to take it home!! How's that gonna work? Bathtub, she can keep it in the bathtub. How about some table salt to make its "natural environment"? Ooo nice touch. Yeah, pour in all in. We gotta manipulate them all a bit more yet - creature stops breathing for a moment before the salt takes effect! Genius.
7. Not, not enough. Dream sequence. Yeah. In a ballroom - they are romantically attached and we as writer/director have no imagination of sensitivity to come up with anything - so, put them in a ballroom. The fish man and girl ballroom dancing in a dream sequence!!!! In An American in Paris, Top Hat, Singin' in the Rain The Red Shoes, dancing as part of the action works wonderfully. The difference here? Manipulative and shallow filmmaking leads to expose of just how much imagination the man really has.