it left me feeling ashamed, disgusted, and betrayed.

Rating: 3/10 (24 March 2018)

Perverse sex, tired stereotypical characters, gratuitous nudity, and a clownish creature that we're supposed to empathize with, all make me wonder what the academy sees in this film. The story: a new species of aquatic humanoid is found in South America and transported back to a Baltimore oceanographic institute. The head of security wants to vivisect it. The Russians want to kill it so that the Americans can't study it. And the lonely mute cleaning woman wants to have sex with it. I don't know how it ended, because I had no interest in the outcome of such a silly, twisted fable. I shut it down and went to bed. I have always been a great admirer of Guillermo del Toro's films-until now. What's the message here? Are there no limits on what we can have sex with? Does sexual fulfillment trump all ideas of decency? Is this the best our culture can do in defining a meaning for our lives? How squalid and bankrupt a vision we are left with in this and other films like it. The whole thing left me feeling that I was supposed to be carried away with the charm and romance of the story; but it left me feeling ashamed, disgusted, and betrayed.