Perhaps I am sick of the story. Man makes fire, man burns the world. But there's a lot more I felt disappointed about watching Del Toro's 'Frankenstein'. Please remember I've also read the book, so my reading might have been a little more hypercritical, though I'm always more than willing to see new directions on old texts, particularly this one as it has captured and held our imagination since it was written in 1917.

Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' examined the worst of science - what happens when men play God, and don't think of the consequences. Victor Frankenstein isn't inventing an atom bomb, penicillin, or indeed artifical intelligence - but animating bodies from the dead, cobbled together, inexplicibly, from body parts. Having created the fire of life from corpses, he recoils from the creature/child he has made (some queer readings of the text suggest a homophobia or a rejection of homosexual desires, which could be the subject of a whole other post) which, starved of affection and feared because he's a - well, freak of nature, he resorts to revenge, killing Victor's sibling/bride on their wedding night.

Del Toro's more recent Netflix-ation of the Frankenstein story makes small changes which for me, frustratingly, didn't change the story enough to be a modern Prometheus for these times. Prometheus, the ultimate trickster God, created fire and thus modern humans (though he was punished for this trangression, doomed to have his liver eternally eaten by an eagle - fun times). I felt there was an opportunity for this Frankenstein to be an exploration of what makes intelligence, thus exploring the more modern theme of AI, as well as a few other chances to fully explore characters, but I guess one can only stray so far from the original text. A mini series or extended series could have really taken many of the themes way further than Del Toro's two and a half hour film could have.

He's not even that monstrously ugly, am I right?

Given Mary Shelley's mother was a famous feminist, I would have liked a modern reading to explore female agency more than it did. I did like the way they gave Elizabeth more depth in the film than the book (in the novel she never meets the 'monster' let alone falls in love with him), herself fascinated with life/science like Shelley must have been reading about experimentation with electricity animated frogs. Mia Goth's Elizabeth is first seen holding a skull, fascinated at it's anatomy or perhaps death itself. Here is a woman who will not swoon at corpses or run horrified and hysterical from the dead brought back to life. She examines, in minute detail, the butterfly under the glass with it's many eyes and four hearts, perhaps aware that she, as a woman, is also objectified and captive, having only as much free will as society allows her. Perhaps it's this that enables her to immediately identify with the scarred creation Victor keeps chained. I scoffed at the idea that she'd fall immediately in love with him (did she see through the scars to the very easy on the eye Jacob Elordi?) but appreciated her more scientific eye, examining him as a curiousity and a human, unlike Victor who hadn't considered anything about what life would mean and whether the human he'd raise from the dead would have human needs.

I hated Victor in the book - he's hysterical, obsessive, self pitying, totally unlikeable. I felt his character could have been more sympathetic and fleshed out - excuse the pun - in Del Toro's film, but found him irritating, and the plot more so. There's a couple of points where things move far too fast - one moment he's getting his bro (a new character invented by the film that takes on Elizabeth's role as being pure to Victor's blackness) to run the show and next minute he's ADHD'ing the experiment to bring his creature to life, ignoring the desires of the syphilitic benefactor who inexplicably thinks bringing his diseased body parts to life will work and plugging in the lightning rod up the tower in a thunderstorm when surely it may have been a better idea to do it beforehand. Then it's the flash forward to the show down on the ice, only briefly exploring the creature's isolation and hatred of Victor who has been the worst father. I also gagged at Elizabeth being besotted by the creature - this character arc was as a flimsy as a butterfly wing. Again, her rejection of Victor and desire for the monster could have been poignantly and richly explored in a series. I can't help but wish for an entire film to be made of the story from Elizabeth's point of view.

There's something inherently feminist about the story and of course a modern version had to be a bit more overt with this, exploring how monstrous men can be, especially as they pursue their own interests at the expense of others. Yet in many ways Shelley plays into stereotypes herself - women, as creators, are more nurturing, nourishing, loving. Men too, of course, can be tender. But not men with egos, who seek to create without taking responsibility for the outcome, that are concerned more with their own desire to play God that they forego their own humanity.

Of course any good text offers multiple readings, and there's other interesting things I saw in the film too. Elizabeth, for example, fascinated with insects, and her beautiful green dress like the Christmas beetles she sketches on the floor at home. She doesn't have a room of her own, after all, to do 'science' - a male pursuit. In 'Poor Things', Bella becomes a doctor, fully realised as a strong and independent woman. Although Del Toro's Elizabeth shows some mind of her own, she still dies a bride, though at Victor's hand not the creatures, who is decidedly a better human in the film. Oh, sorry, I'm rambling - back to the bugs. In Victorian England, there was a lot more bugs. We've destroyed them with industrialisation, mass agriculture. What's one of the solutions? Make bugs from parts so that we can pollinate genetically modified crops. Frankensteins, the lot of us, creating life and destroying it, ad infinitum.

If you're going to watch any kind of Frankenstein film, watch 'Poor Things' - I think a modern Shelley would have approved of Bella, a far more well rounded woman than Elizabeth because her creator allowed her to be. Victor's bride, and his creation, fail because of his lack of empathy - to me he's a sociopath, almost a narcissist, which makes his plea for forgiveness at the end so much more unbelievable. His Damascus moment never seems to come because he truly understands the creatures humanity and how he mistreats it, but that he might be remembered poorly for his failure to truly bring life to beautiful, healthy fruition. And why suddenly call him son on his death bed? Was the creatures story so compellingly told that Victor reneged on years of obsessively hunting the poor guy to kill him? The film lacks the dialogue of the novel of course, never truly exploring his thoughts on the creature and his responsibility for it. In the novel, it's more likely that Victor follows him onto the ice because the creature has slaughtered his family in revenge, but in the film, Victor seems to ignore he was the one who fired the shot that killed her and that he was the murderer.

I hope I haven't given any plot spoilers away, and rest assured, I did enjoy the film as part of the canon of Frankenstein retellings, and believe it added to the canon in some interesting ways, but ultimately, it's little better than a 6/10 from me. Watchable, but frustratingly feeble.

With Love,

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