Guillermo del Toro’s heart is almost always with the monsters. Plenty of his movies have sympathetic, fully human characters, but he obviously loves a story where a monster shows glimmers of personhood, while “real” people show their worst, most monstrous instincts. (Maybe that’s why it was ultimately hard to buy Pacific Rim as a passion project: Those kaiju were ultimately just big creatures with no potential for humanity.) That almost makes del Toro too obvious a choice to adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: What more could he bring to the original text beyond reiterating it? Del Toro’s gorgeous film, hitting Netflix this week after a brief theatrical run, holds the unexpected answer: He makes Frankenstein’s monster into a kind of superhero.
This sounds like a ghastly turn, not least because it recalls the mid-2010s micro-trend of turning monster-movie material into schlock meant to evoke a comic-book sensibility that the filmmakers were ill-equipped to reproduce. Movies like Victor Frankenstein (2015), Dracula Untold (2014), and especially I, Frankenstein (2014) aimed to bring famous monster stories to younger audiences, hoping for Marvel-style excitement. Instead, they wound up as Screen Gems-style muck, only nowhere near as fun as that label’s Resident Evil or Underworld horror-action bread and butter.
Cosmetically, some of del Toro’s most noticeable changes to Frankenstein are surprisingly in line with I, Frankenstein. That movie stars Aaron Eckhart as a seemingly immortal version of Frankenstein’s monster, living for centuries past his initial creation, battling gargoyle demons with what is described as “strength, speed, and stamina far beyond that of any human.” Del Toro’s film does not, in fact, include any gargoyle demons, but like the Eckhart version, he does possess strength and stamina that appear superhuman, alongside a healing factor that rivals Wolverine’s. (Also as with I, Frankenstein: the creature is on the balance, pretty hot for an undead guy.)
As in Shelley’s book, the Creature (Jacob Elordi) is “born” into an oversized, stitched-together body without the ability to speak or read, then subsequently learns these skills and becomes both eloquent and despairing about his strange state, existing somewhere between life and death. This version of the Creature seems to be more or less immortal; there’s probably a way to kill him somehow, but everything he and others try ultimately fails. In other words, his abnormalities are a gift and a curse, like just about every modern set of superpowers. (Or maybe like every physical body, full stop.)
Elordi’s Creature demonstrates his powered-up prowess in the movie’s Arctic-set sequences, where he pursues his wounded creator Victor (Oscar Isaac), holed up on a ship stuck in the ice. Attacked by the ship’s sailors, the Creature dispatches them with brutal ease, tossing the men around like rag dolls and seeming to punch at least one of them to death. He also nearly tips the ship over with his massive strength. Mere bullets and explosions cannot stop him. It’s been a while since I’ve read Frankenstein, but I don’t remember any scenes where Shelley’s version smashes his way through half a dozen distinct slasher-meets-John Wick kills, or blows himself up with dynamite, only to watch as his skin crackles back into working order.
On a simple lizard-brain level, these moments are great bits of action-horror. They are, unsurprisingly, far better-executed in terms of cinematography and visual effects than equivalent moments in I, Frankenstein. More impressively, though, del Toro takes the potentially cringeworthy concept of a superhero-coded Frankenstein’s monster and imbues it with a poignancy often lacking in actual superhero movies.
Understandably, a lot of filmmakers adapting comics don’t want to veer too heavily into their heroes’ existential despair. If a dark, brooding superhero movie isn’t as good as a Christopher Nolan Batman or James Mangold Wolverine entry, it can easily look like goofy teen angst playing dress-up. (It can also, if things go very badly, look like I, Frankenstein or any number of “dark” emo fantasies.)
Del Toro’s Frankenstein, though, has no particular obligation toward an audience of children, so his version of Shelley’s character is free to wallow in the grimness of unsolicited eternal life. Like everyone in the world before him (and as so many teenagers have verbalized), the Creature didn’t ask to be born. He also hasn’t lived long enough in his monster-y form to have wished, as so many people idly might, for eternal (or at least extended) life. He curses his maker not just for his life, but for his inability to die.
Frankenstein stops short of suggesting that the Creature will learn to use his gift/curse for the good of all mankind, or go recruit a mummy and a gill-man to put a team together. But through the bulking up of his superpowers, del Toro does tap into the more primal aspects of man-monster superhero hybrids like the Hulk or the Thing, who themselves have notes of Universal Monster-style misfits. Bruce Banner might be most closely associated with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but when he toggles from a brilliant scientist to the halting speech of a humanoid monster, he also evokes Dr. Frankenstein and the movie version of his famous creation. The Marvel superhero del Toro has worked with, the half-vampire Blade, fuses Dracula and his vampire-hunting nemesis Van Helsing. Del Toro has also made two movies about Hellboy, a half-demon superhero.
His Frankenstein isn’t as mirthful as those movies, by design. It’s even arguable that by focusing so empathetically on the Creature, del Toro loses some of Dr. Frankenstein’s dimension (despite Isaac’s gloriously frenzied performance), so as to better hammer home the questions about who’s the real monster in this situation, which isn’t really a question at all.
But del Toro compensates for any conceptual obviousness by so cleverly translating his Creature into a modern action-fantasy framework. He amps up the Creature’s abilities in order to zero in on how they would further alienate him from humanity, and raise the question of how this monster might find peace if denied the opportunity to surrender his life. Suddenly, the low stakes of the modern unkillable superhero become deeply poignant. Maybe that’s del Toro’s gift and curse: He’s a great superhero director, even when he isn’t making superhero movies.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is streaming on Netflix now.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
