Frankenstein (2025)

I despised the book, but remarkably, the movie doesn't fail in those ways -- it finds new ways to fail!

The book fails because it's senseless groveling for 10x the length it needed to state its message. The movie replaces that trivia with some very cinematic stuff, making it a more obvious emotional experience, but failing by those shallow theatrics. Some of the visual style is cool, and I like a movie with bold artistry. But that's just del Toro table stakes. The substance of the movie is excessive, silly, and misguided. It's not good writing; it's trying to sound old-fashioned and profound, and it's a simple failure to make a good story. It's a hodgepodge -- a Frankenstein -- of the book, the earlier movies, and del Toro's own vision, and it feels like a hodgepodge. It feels arbitrary, like no professional wrote this movie, a high schooler just handed their script to some technical masters. There's no mastery in the writing, from the dialogue to the plot.

Besides the atmosphere, everything just fell short, wasn't all that great. Isaac did his job, but the script didn't do him justice. I generally liked Elordi. Waltz was wasted. Goth's character made no sense.

Guillermo del Toro thus drops way down for me. I haven't seen much from him, and I remember liking Pan's Labyrinth a long time ago, but the fact that he loved Frankenstein and dreamt for so long of making the perfect adaptation -- only to make this -- is a whole host of red flags. This guy and I must not connect. Now in hindsight, I can see that even his live action movies are kind of cartoonish. He digs fairy tales, thus his visuals, while impressive, almost look animated, and his scripts lack nuance. I can't say that for sure without seeing more of his movies, but that's the sense I'm getting.

It was more faithful to the book than most Frankenstein content I've seen, but betrayed the book in a few critical ways. It was more fantastical, donning much of the Frankenstein image that's been generated by everyone except Mary Shelley: the gothic grandeur, the wacky technology, the epic staging. The book didn't focus on these fantasy elements; Victor simply found a scientific solution to the problem of death, no giant red and green solenoids needed; and the staging wasn't darkly gorgeous, it was just grisly and cynical. The only fantasy was that the science actually succeeded. The rest was simply-garbed. It was gothic not in the sense of Notre Dame but in the sense of wretchedness.

Another departure from the book was the ending. I hated the ending, maybe because it was so different from the book that it felt corrupt. It felt random, inauthentic, unjustified.