The Shape of Disbelief

Rating: 1/10 (18 March 2018)

I am always game for a good fantasy movie. Some of my favorites are the LOTR releases and Pan's Labarynth, which del Toro also directed. I was excited to see this movie because I believe in his vision. I didn't read any reviews but just went in blind.
This movie for me was a major disappointment. The characters are totally two-dimensional. I get it, Strickland is a baddie and Elisa is a lonely woman with a heart of gold. This movie is mainly about society's broken things. People who are achingly lonely inside of their own lives, I get it. You don't have to hit me over the head with this angle by showing Elisa feverishly masturbating in the tub or Giles getting rebuffed angrily by the pie-shop hottie. Or Zelda constantly complaining about her significant other. I understand, people will go to extraordinary, even bizarre measures, to find companionship and love. Human beings for the most part want to connect, to belong.
But no, I cannot fathom any woman having sex with the amphibian creature. This whole part of story line made me so uncomfortable I really wanted to turn the movie off. The only reason I didn't was because I wanted to see how it ended. Should not have bothered because the ending was the most absurd part of the movie.
So Elisa learns to exist underwater with fish-man? How exactly would THIS work? The answer is it would not, on any level. This movie would have worked had Elisa and fish-man connected on a platonic level. I could have totally bought it. Still trying to figure out why the laughable dance/song sequence was thrown in. Was the movie not long enough?
The sets and filming are gorgeous, 50's cold-war era meets steampunk. The film score is magical. The rest of the movie is a complete waste of time. del Toro, and other directors, need to learn the whole idea of nuanced characters. People are (generally speaking) not all good nor all bad. When two-dimensional characters are developed and poor dialogue is written it is just plain laziness.