Move Over, ‘The Shape of Water,’ Netflix Has Its Own Fish-Man Flick with ‘The Titan’

We should probably clarify right off the top that The Titan, the new science-fiction film streaming on Netflix, is not on the same level as the Best Picture-winning Guillermo Del Toro film The Shape of Water, and if you’re going in with those expectations you’re going to be sadly disappointed. Look at the Shape of Water cast list: Sally Hawkins! Michael Shannon! Richard Jenkins! Octavia Spencer! Now look at the cast list for The Titan: Sam Worthington. Taylor Schilling. Tom W— … wait, Tom Wilkinson is in this? Hey, a two-time Oscar nominee still has to eat, I suppose. But your Sam Worthington/Taylor Schilling joint is generally speaking not going to be your 13-nomination Best Picture Oscar winner.

Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Lennart Ruff and written by first-time feature screenwriter Max Hurwitz, The Titan is a sci-fi creation that draws upon one of the most recurring obsessions within the genre: the Earth is dying. Sometimes it’s through war, sometimes famine, sometimes through natural disasters; we’ve seen films where the planet is freezing, is boiling, has become flooded, and the core of the planet has stopped spinning. The bottom line is that this rock is cooked, and we all need to get the hell off it. Ruff and Hurwitz (working off a story by Arash Amel) turn to the moons of Saturn for humankind’s salvation, specifically Titan (see where we’re going now?).

Sam Worthington (Avatar and its many theoretical sequels) plays a military type who signs up for a crucial experiment. You see much like Mordor, one doesn’t just walk onto Titan. It’s a moon of Saturn! It’s not for people-walking! So what Earth’s top scientists must do is, rather than terraform Titan (i.e. change its environment to suit people), they’re going to terraform the people. Change them on some fundamental level so that they can adapt to Titan’s environment. Worthington does not take this assignment lightly, nor does his wife, played by Taylor Schilling (Orange Is the New Black). The experiment is successful, and at first it just means the usual super-soldier stuff. Strength, endurance, a particular upgrade in his swimming abilities. But then things get weirder. Worthington’s character begins exhibiting more extreme changes. And not to yada-yada past the best part (I mentioned the swimming!), at some point, the end product of these experiments is that Worthington’s character becomes … a fish-man.

Look, I know. Referring to The Shape of Water as “the fish-fucker movie” was one of my biggest pet peeves of the Oscar season, a way for people to distance themselves from a movie that was about longing and how rare it is to find someone who truly sees you. And then it was about the fish-fucking. I’ll say this, though: Taylor Schilling is in no mood to fuck this fish, even though she knows he used to be her husband. Something about how he can no longer communicate with her. Things manage to get even more intense from there.

The Titan doesn’t deserve to be in the same breath as The Shape of Water, but there’s undeniably a thread connecting the two. 2018 is very big on sexy fish men. Maybe, in this era of Trump and Twitter fights, we’ve all subconsciously decided to take Homer Simpson’s advice and live under the sea. The Titan gets that impulse, even if the end result of our desired fish-man-ification is alienation from our loved ones, an inability to communicate, and a tendency towards violence. But, you know, we could swim laps really fast.

Stream The Titan on Netflix