Mary Shelley - An Apology.

Remember a few months back, maybe it was weeks, that I wrote a piece reviewing the science fiction classic by Mary Shelley: Frankenstein. Sparing everyone the need to go back and read what I wrote then, I essentially wrote that I found the book a joyless read with passages that downright bored me. Its obviously a classic, its obviously ground-breaking and its obviously one of the greatest works every written by a female author. But it didn't catch me in the way I expected it would, THAT BEING SAID. I recently watched the new Frankenstein movie from Netflix, and let me tell you, I have a new appreciation for that book.

The movie was a mess. It is going to be lauded as a work of brilliance by the recency bias appreciators but this might have been the weakest adaptation I have ever seen for this source material. It flies as close to the book as it dares while changing fundamental aspects of the story to make it more palatable for todays audience. For the first time in my life I had the experience and anger of seeing a book I had read being butchered on the big screen, I finally understood the fans who push back when a book or story they've read has been bent and battered into something uglier for an easier studio pitch.

Warning, there will be spoilers ahead.

I will cycle quickly through my gripes with the movie and then summarise why all of this is so fundamentally ruinous to a book that I now have a new found appreciation towards. Jumping right into it; I was ready for the movie to be changing specific details, minor things like ethnicities, accents, locations, purely based on the landscape of modern media. Its expected. But when the movie starts with the creature chasing Viktor onto the boat trapped in the ice and physically hurling grown men hundreds of feet into the air, well let just say I was sinking into the couch with worry.

We flash back to a young Viktor being taught biology and anatomy by his father as his mother plays the soft hand to contrast the father now being abusive for some reason (which isn't in the original story), it would appear that having another angry old man also be abusive is good for the Netflix audience. The young actor plays the part well, but the mother dies and is buried in some odd looking ceramic coffin with a detachable mask to cover her face. Its a weird scene and again, not in the book, but something I ignored for stylistic licence of the director. What bugged me more was the complete 360 the father figure plays from book to film, he is a damaged but vulnerable and loving character towards his children in the book, his portrayal as some abusive tyrant was wildly unnecessary. Even going as far to have his father literally whip him across the face while teaching him about the human body. 

Viktor's mother dies giving birth to his younger brother, a scene that is played out very abruptly. He blames his father for not trying his best to save her during childbirth and then vows to conquer death. Something added in the movie that completely erases his studying of outdated science considered archaic and dark to test the limits of human creating life. It removed the entire period of his life studying abroad, removed the entire best friend arch, removed the location of his monsters creation and removed the entire arch of Elizabeth being an orphan that is adopted by HIS family and not some niece of a German maniac with syphilis.

WHY.

The changes did not make the film stronger, they made it more ridiculous and fantastical. Frankenstein is a book that strips away at the goodness and hope as each page turns, it takes what you expect to be a tale of man conquering the beast he created and scrunches it into the ball of despair in which a well-meaning man watches his creation slowly devour his friends, family, prospects and finally his mind. Trivialising his efforts to study the dark ages of human anatomy to discover his methods for god-like creation means that we lose the depth of his vulnerability. Instead we witness Viktor torturing and beating his creature in a sub-basement of a weird castle-slash-treatment plant for the sole purpose of getting it to speak.

That brings me onto the moment in the movie that I audibly gasped like a fragile admirer of the written words. Viktor blows up his castle-sanatorium in a terrible plan to destroy his monster, how a brilliant scientist thinks burning a building made of stone and porcelain was going to be effective after watching his creature literally heal before his eyes is already stupid enough. But a few scenes later, the creature moves into the gear-room of a small family farms mill. This is close enough to the movie that I ignored it, until the literal WOLVES came. There is a terrible scene where CGI wolves storm the farm in the middle of the day, attack a bunch of sheep and try to force their way into the building. The resident hunters who are used way more in the movie than the book to amp up the threat, chase off the wolves. It was a terrible scene and one added for no reasons I can fathom beyond the wolves returning later to kill the blind man that treats the monster kindly. 

It wasn't all that which had me gasping. It was the line from the monster in which he states; "I learned something from them. WORDS" which truly had be sighing loudly for this to end. In the book, the monster flees almost immediately after meeting his maker, he runs away to the forest and his story starts here. He has zero interaction with Viktor beyond a terrified screaming match when he awakens Viktor in his attic laboratory. But in the movie, the creature spends a good amount of time talking with Viktor (mainly exchanging two words), so why does he only suddenly say that NOW he learns words. He was literally speaking words with Elizabeth and Viktor not thirty minutes prior. It made no sense. Even after the montage in which he learns words, reads books and converses with the blind old man, the creature later stills speaks sporadically like a cave person. 

I will just add that in the later stages of the book, the creature is a beautiful speaker with some of the best lines in the entire novel.

So here I am, spiralling to the end of the movie, thank god. But not before they seemed to remember that the monster killed almost everyone in Viktor's life. It comes to the wedding day in which for some new reason devoid from the book, that William (Viktor's younger brother) and Elizabeth (who should have been his adopted sibling) are getting married. Viktor wakes up and attaches a prosthetic leg for some new character building reason, he goes to talk to Elizabeth about not actually loving her anymore (yawn) and then rages back to his room only to find the monster to be waiting for him. They fight after he now mentions the companion he wants manufacturing, this erases the entire Scotland passage in the book that really made Viktors demise all the more cemented after half making a bride but destroying her before its too late. The monster attacks Viktor, Elizabeth charges in to defend the creature and gets shot by Viktor in the process. He pins the death on the creature despite having a gun beside him and William charges the wretch, he kills William and this sets off the chase of the two main characters that ends in the arctic circle. 

Thus far we have lost; Viktor's studying years, his best friend, his quiet unspoken love for an adopted sibling, his travels to London, his travels to Scotland in which he half-creates a female monster, his trial on a small island after the locals discover a body, William being killed in the forest by the monster, Elizabeth being killed on THEIR wedding night and finally the closing scene in which the monster finds Viktor ALREADY dead aboard the ship. 

He then discloses his story to the captain before walking himself into a fire to die. 

Even writing this ranting blog piece, my apology to the original author Mary Shelley for my misunderstanding of just how poorly her story could have been told, I feel deflated for the two and a half hours I will never get back. They gutted this dark story and turned into some easily digestible story of plain black and white morals. Viktor was made into some maniac genius because of his fathers abuse and his mothers death, instead of being a genius with an admiration for the discarded parts of dark science that led him to believe he could become a god among men. We didn't have a monster that was tragic, we had a monster that was some dough eyed sympathetic love interest for the main female character before he becomes some marvel power levelled bad guy. 

Netflix took a dark, slow burning and swirling tale of morality and turned it into a sanitised "good-vs-evil switcheroo" in which Viktor is the bad guy as long as you ignore the literal monster capable of killing entire boat crews without blinking. They somehow tore the soul from a book that threatened to have no soul in the first place, we gave Mary Shelley's story our own judgement as we are the morality imposed upon these characters. Netflix decided we aren't smart enough for that, and instead gave clear dividing lines between "good" and "bad".

Mary Shelley, I apologise. I was wrong. You created a morally testing novel that once imitated had me longing to return to your passages amongst the deep pine snowy forests of Europe. I wanted your story to be brought to life on the big screen as you wrote, instead I got the current landscapes idea of what a modern Frankenstein could be - and I wanted their wretch of a movie to burn.