Amélie and the fishy Beast: very fishy

Rating: Null/10 (6 March 2018)

*SPOILERS*
The movie takes 20 minutes of introducing us to the main character and her life. The beginning provides a few laughs, sets the tone, but it's way too stretched out and contains useless details that will never pay off later. Maybe they realized that they bored the audience, so they jump right into the fish creature romance.
There's a disgusting and possibly dangerous alien fish creature chained in a laboratory and the main character starts immediately feeding it and flirting with it! I get it, it's perceived as different from the norm, which is a symbol for the minorities that are featured in the movie (gay, mute, black) and all of them work together in the end. But it looks like a monster that could easily be featured in a horror movie and the script skipped any rational initial caution, followed by a slow build up of sympathy and intimacy. Instead, the movie wanted me to be invested and accepting from the beginning and it didn't work for me one bit. Famously, there is the scene where the lady is screwing with the fish, which is just... wrong.
The bad guys are so stereotypical bad, it's really cheesy. Again, the symbolism is clear: it's a commentary on the culture of the 1960ies (and possibly still today). But can you really judge people of a former decade with today's morals? Anyway, the movie does not do anything intellectually challenging with this. Instead, the third act ended completely predictable with a showdown that reminded me a lot of E.T.
The movie is incredibly well shot and the acting is mostly solid ( a bit over the top on the villains' part) but it does not live up to it's full potential. Of course this won the best picture votes from the older Academy members, because it briefly shows a couple of old movie scenes and it's nostalgic for the late 1950ies / early 60ies.