Why mess with perfection? Frankenstein’s monster in Guillermo del Toro’s film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic is of course not a monster, but a misunderstood victim of the prejudices of his time—which prejudices is not clearly spelled out. It’s a purposeless mess, albeit beautifully shot.
The story starts at where the book ends, in the Arctic. A Scandinavian captain (British in the book) with a ship stuck in the ice is facing mutiny as he refuses to abandon his mapping mission; he suddenly observes a critically injured Victor Frankenstein in the midst of a tent fire, whom he promptly rescues. Unbeknownst to the captain and his crew, the good count is hunted by the monster that carries his surname, who immediately attacks the ship and kills a fair number of his crew. Bullets fail to have any effect on the creature, who however faces a minor setback and goes down the icy water temporarily when the ice breaks, allowing the crew to take the count in for treatment.
It is then that the first part of the known story begins, as a flashback. The count (Oscar Isaac) explains how his Victorian liberalism stems from his reactionary father (Charles Dance), a notable surgeon who failed to save Victor’s mother. The rest of the movie is an inverse of the book, told from the vantage points of the protagonist and the monster. Victor creates the monster, which turns out to be a dumb goof with learning disabilities. Victor bizarrely begins to hate the monster; at the same time; Victor’s brother’s fiancée (a devastating Mia Goth) absurdly falls in love with it.
Victor tries to kill the monster, but fails, and the monster flees, learns how to speak, and comes back for revenge and desire for a companion. The cycle of violence ends in the monster finding Victor, and Victor forgiving him on top of the ship and dying immediately. The monster leaves, and helps the ship break free of ice, and the captain, bemused at this random turn of events, immediately asks his crew to sail for “home,” all earlier bloviating about “abandoning the mission” notwithstanding.
What is the overarching theme of the film? Clearly, it misunderstands the central dilemma of Victorian morality: a strongly Protestant individual liberalism set against man’s hubris in a changing world, where both faith and sense of community are rapidly collapsing in the light and smoke of industrial science. Misunderstanding this tension renders any adaptation of Victorian literature completely inconsequential.
Frankenstein’s monster was not described as a monster because of prejudice, but because he really was a monster. Created by the hubris of the Victorian scientific man, he was a brute who didn’t have the civilized upbringing necessary to teach him prudence, restraint, morality or manners. In the book, he quite literally murders a woman in his quest to get a companion.
Victor Frankenstein started to hate and fear his own creation because he realized that a mortal creation does not reflect the imago Dei, and never will. The movie bypasses this central theme and reads straight out of the worldview of a rehabilitative-justice–oriented criminal prosecutor from Chicago, Portland, or Seattle. That is fine, but doesn’t quite explain the half-baked plot of the change of heart of Count Frankenstein in the movie. Did he hate his creation because he was slow to learn letters? And did he start to love him because he could form syntactically correct sentences? Barring actual acts of immorality and criminality, the heightened passions demonstrated by the protagonists in the movie defy both cinematic and dramatic logic.
Consider how rapidly society changed between the final days of Napoleon and the final days of Victoria—the transformation from the age of chivalry and sail, symphonies and Shelley, to telegraphs, rail lines, and frontiers, meritocratic imperialism, Charles Darwin, polar adventures, steamships, and Gatling guns. Each of those developments destroyed feudalism and faith incrementally, in what is now considered the first wave of borderless globalization and imperialism. The entire canon of 19th-century science-fiction literature reflects the fears of a society that still carried the fumes of austere, late Protestant morality.
Frankenstein is era-defining; it was the start of a literary trend describing works of scientific hubris resulting in horrors, one that carried on with The Invisible Man, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and The Island of Dr Moreau—each a story of man trying to play God.
In our age of transgender mutilation and body-modification, borderless social media hatred from global subalterns, and state-mandated euthanasia in erstwhile Protestant superpowers that fought against the exact same policies in Nazi Germany a lifetime ago, Frankenstein’s world seems to be positively beatific. The movie is worth watching for camera work, but I’d suggest people read the original book.
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