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Reinterpreting classic monster stories as sympathetic portrayals of misfits is nothing new but Guillermo del Toro reaches new heights with 2017's The Shape of Water. An unabashed ode to Creature from the Black Lagoon and, to a lesser extent, King Kong, The Shape of Water teases out the hints of erotic and romantic subtext in those films into a lovely, full blown fantasy romance film.



Arguably Del Toro's most political film, even more than The Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth, the action is set in 1962, rather than Black Lagoon's 1954. The civil rights movement, the Red Scare, and the Cold War are all integral aspects of the film's backdrop and occasionally its plot. The film's two central protagonists are a mute--but not deaf--woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and a gay man named Giles (Richard Jenkins). Their thematic connexion to the "Amphibian Man" (Doug Jones), trapped in a lab by the white, Christian, heterosexual men of the U.S. government is not ambiguous. Giles agrees to help Elisa rescue the creature after he's cruelly rejected, in an effectively brutal scene, by a man in a cafe. He understands then why Elisa might feel some camaraderie with the beast.



Thankfully, the movie doesn't simply render the monster a thoroughly safe and passive version of the Gill Man from Creature of the Black Lagoon. One scene that will be especially unpleasant to cat lovers shows the Amphibian Man is, like the Gill Man, a wild animal capable of killing with little discrimination. I also liked that Giles was surprisingly understanding about it. Jenkins is very good in the film as the often put upon and mildly exasperated voice of reason.



Creature from the Black Lagoon is already a film that puts much more blame on human arrogance than on any ideas the monster might have. The true villain of the 1954 film is arguably the one scientist who wants to kill or capture the creature for his own glory. The other humans are pretty vocal about not wanting to kill it and wanting to allow it to remain in its natural habitat. I watched Creature from the Black Lagoon again last night and I was surprised how many little things Del Toro references in Shape of Water. Even the odd idea that study of the Gill Man can somehow be utilised for space travel. Like the male protagonist of Black Lagoon, a Russian spy working under the name of Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) in Shape of Water voices the assertion that it would be more valuable to study the creature alive than dead. His adversary is Colonel Strickland played by Stuhlbarg's Boardwalk Empire co-star Michael Shannon.



Shannon's great talent for playing violent men is further emphasised by two severed figures that were reattached early in the film. They become more and more discoloured over the course of the film and work nicely both to add to tension and to add the sense that the colonel himself is becoming monstrous.



Doug Jones is fantastic as usual as the Amphibian Man and his make-up and costume pay homage to the great Gill Man costume with the addition of more expressive eyes. But it's Sally Hawkins as Elisa at the heart of the film.



Quite fearless in scenes depicting her masturbating in the bath, Hawkins helps the film express fully the erotic undertones of Black Lagoon by providing more intimacy with the female protagonist's internal motives and needs. Her vulnerability and determination in her identification with the monster are also beautifully expressed resulting in a surprising, and surprisingly effective, musical number.



Octavia Spencer plays a kind of a stock character as Elisa's friend and coworker. Spencer's comedic timing is nice enough but Colonel Stickland's casual racism talking to her doesn't quite make up for her unimaginative character. Her and Elisa being the cleaning women adds kind of a nice remark on classism, though.

It almost goes without saying, but really, it's worth repeating--the film is visually stunning.

Starfleet's finest continued trying to discover motivations for their pointless arguments in last night's new Star Trek: Discovery while Klingons struggled to show emotion through a thick sheath of makeup and full Daedric armour. But the show's flaws were once again offset by lovely visuals and good performances.

Spoilers after the screenshot



I'm pretty sure if Buffy stakes this guy it wipes out all the vampires in Sunnydale. So far Vulcans are the only aliens to be depicted with hair on STD. Is there something too human about hair now?

Klingon cuisine is certainly more colourful in the Discovery timeline.



It seems the Klingons are having trouble keeping their people fed, unlike the Federation, which could be an interesting motivation behind their war effort. I wonder how the writers will follow up on it in future episodes. Maybe it's because the Federation is too busy feeding people they left some valuable equipment floating around on the Shenzhou for the Klingons to salvage.



What gorgeous ships.



Meanwhile, on the Discovery, a turbolift conversation between Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Saru (Doug Jones) establishes that his "threat ganglia" can react even when the threats Saru perceives aren't real, as in the case of Michael just standing next to him on the turbolift. With this established, in a later scene Michael can use Saru's threat ganglia to determine whether "Ripper", the tardigrade creature from the previous episode, is really a threat. Er, right?



I kept thinking about the now oft-quoted line from Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." In this case I'm thinking of the writers who were so excited to ditch Gene Roddenberry's rule for Federation people that they not have interpersonal conflicts. Now we have interpersonal conflicts for no reason at all. When Saru realises Michael is using his threat sensor to gauge something about the tardigrade's nature, the supposed science officer has his feelings hurt by his colleague's benign attempt to learn things about an alien creature he compares her to the presumably ruthless Captain Lorca and storms off. I guess this series depicts the adolescence of the Federation.



The episode is called "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry", best read in the voice of Nathan Explosion. I guess the lamb in this case might refer to the dumbest tactical officer in Starfleet, Landry (Rekha Sharma), who douses an alien life form with tranquilliser and opens its cage before knowing if the tranquilliser worked and fires a phaser at it she knows doesn't work. Luckily Michael has presence of mind to set the lights to full, causing the creature to retreat to darkness, despite apparently not being bothered by light later on when it's feasting on fungus. As dumb as Landry was, I still felt annoyed for her sake when Michael called her out for referring to the creature as a monster. How was Landry to know the creature's behaviour would completely change from the previous episode when it attacked a Klingon just for shushing someone? Maybe it remembered the Klingon attacking it earlier, so it's a lucky thing it apparently forgot about Michael attacking it in the previous episode.



But lest I give the impression I found nothing good in this episode, the sequence where the Discovery escapes from a sun's gravity is really cool. Still, I am a little tempted to stop watching, but the next episode may be written by better writers and anyway I do want to see Rainn Wilson's take on Harry Mudd.