In 1994, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein almost ruined Kenneth Branagh’s career while this year’s equivalent of a remake from Guillermo Del Toro received almost universal praise despite making almost the same movie substantially worse.
In 1994, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein almost ruined Kenneth Branagh’s career. Though opinions of the film have generally improved in the more than three decades since its release, a combination of poor critical reception, the consensus that Robert De Niro was miscast as the monster, what many considered inexplicable changes from the original book and films, and lackluster box office made it easy to label the effort a misguided flop at the time. For example, Janet Maslin of The New York Times came close to outright ridicule, when she claimed “Branagh is in over his head. He displays neither the technical finesse to handle a big, visually ambitious film nor the insight to develop a stirring new version of this story. Instead, this is a bland, no-fault Frankenstein for the ‘90s, short on villainy but loaded with the tragically misunderstood. Even the Creature (Robert De Niro), an aesthetically challenged loner with a father who rejected him, would make a dandy guest on any daytime television talk show.” Robert Ebert might have been more favorable when he declared it a near miss, noting “The Creature is on target, but the rest of the film is so frantic, so manic, it doesn’t pause to be sure its effects are registered.” At the time, even those involved in the production attempted to distance themselves from the final product. Steph Lady, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay described the film as “a shocking disappointment; a misshapen monster born of Kenneth Branagh’s runaway ego. He took a poignant, thought-provoking tragedy and turned it into a heavy metal monster movie. The casting of Robert De Niro as the monster was beyond inexplicable.” Frank Darabont, who wrote the second draft, insisted it was “the best script I ever wrote and the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” “There’s a weird doppelgänger effect when I watch the movie. It’s kind of like the movie I wrote, but not at all like the movie I wrote. It has no patience for subtlety. It has no patience for quiet moments. It has no patience period. It’s big and loud and blunt and rephrased by the director at every possible turn. Cumulatively, the effect was a totally different movie. I don’t know why Branagh needed to make this big, loud film … the material was subtle. Shelley’s book was way out there in a lot of ways, but it’s also very subtle. I don’t know why it had to be this operatic attempt at filmmaking. Shelley’s book is not operatic, it whispers at you a lot. The movie was a bad one. That was my Waterloo. That’s where I really got my ass kicked most as a screenwriter … [Branagh] really took the brunt of the blame for that film, which was appropriate. That movie was his vision entirely. If you love that movie you can throw all your roses at Ken Branagh’s feet. If you hated it, throw your spears there too, because that was his movie.” Ultimately, The New York Times listed it as the ninth worst movie of the entire year while Rolling Stone placed it third on the same not-so-illustruous list.
As a result, Mr. Branagh was consigned to the fringes of the industry outside his already in production Hamlet, doing made for HBO Shakespeare adaptations and British television, until many considered him to have redeemed himself more than a decade later by launching the Thor portion of the Marvel Comics Universe, but if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the critics and the industry owe him a sincere apology. How else can you explain the far more positive reception Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein effort received this year when it is essentially a remake in all of the ways that matter? Though he too slighted Mr. Branagh at least somewhat, agreeing with Mr. Darabont that his original 1994 script was “pretty much perfect” and claiming he wanted to make a “Miltonian-tragedy” version of the tale, “What I’m trying to do is take the myth and do something with it, but combining elements of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein without making it just a classical myth of the monster. The best moments in my mind of Frankenstein, of the novel, are yet to be filmed…The only guy that has ever nailed for me the emptiness, not the tragic, not the Miltonian dimension of the monster, but the emptiness is Christopher Lee in the Hammer films, where he really looks like something obscenely alive. Boris Karloff has the tragedy element nailed down but there are so many versions, including that great screenplay by Frank Darabont that was ultimately not really filmed,” it’s hard to take him very seriously when he’s taken the same film and made it subjectively worse in my opinion at least. The similarities are rather hard to ignore. Story wise, Mr. Del Toro opens and ends with the same ship stranded in the ice, creating a parallel between the captain hell bent on finding the North Pole and Victor Frankenstein’s misguided quest to defeat death. He too uses the death of Frankenstein’s mother as the moment he became obsessed, putting this quest above all other things. He proceeds from there to Frankenstein realizing the error of his ways almost immediately upon bringing the monster back from the dead, recognizing that he has violated the laws of nature somehow. While Mr. Del Toro’s Frankenstein believes he’s killed the monster rather than simply being unsure after it flees while he is suffering from a serious illness, Frankenstein somewhat bizarrely assumes he can resume his prior life as if nothing has happened in both versions. He also relies on essentially the same sequence with the blind man and his family, for the monster to learn the ways of humans and to briefly believe he might have a place in the world. When that fails spectacularly and the monster is outcast, both versions of the creature think they can bargain with Frankenstein to make them a bride and when that fails as well, both proceed to slaughter Frankenstein’s family, taking revenge upon its maker for bringing their creation into the world only to abandon it.
Thematically and stylistically, the echoes continue. While Del Toro has the advantage of modern special effects, much grander sets, and better make up, neither are generally considered subtle film-makers and in their own way, both have produced bold, in your face visions with striking designs, costumes, and active camera work. Both have also chosen to make the monster appear more human than earlier versions. Rather than adopting the bolts in the neck, abnormal brain incarnation, Mr. Branagh and Mr. Del Toro’s monster is a thinking, feeling, reasoning being, one who realizes that they are alone and seeks to do something about it, one who is capable of both love and hate at equally incredible extremes. The Dr. Frankenstein characters are also mirror images of one another; men who are obsessed past the point of reason, who are willing to buck tradition and convention to succeed in their experiments, but not willing to pay the price for their desire to upend the natural order of things, who think that afterwards they can somehow escape what they have unleashed without consequence. So too are the ship captains, who, confronted by what blind devotion to a cause above and beyond their men, their families, their very lives can do, choose a different path. The sense that Frankenstein and the monster make amends right before the doctor’s death is also similar. In many ways, even the differences are instructive because none of Mr. Del Toro’s changes have a measurable impact on the outcome, and if anything weaken the film because of it, at least in my humble opinion. Chiefly, Mr. Del Toro makes three changes that seem to be substantive on the surface while offering a less explosive overall climax. First, rather than a loving father as in Mr. Branagh’s version, Frankenstein, is raised by an obsessively demanding doctor himself, one who physically and mentally abuses him while claiming the entire effort is for his own good. Second, the Lady Elizabeth character that Frankenstein falls in love with is engaged to his brother, not his own bride. Third, the Henry Clerval character that serves as Frankenstein’s friend and partner in Mr. Branagh’s adaptation is completely replaced by a rich, mysterious benefactor Henrich Harlander, who is also Elizabeth’s uncle.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to see these changes as serving anything more than simply differentiating the film from the prior version – while bizarrely undercutting many of the key themes. In Mr. Branagh’s telling, Frankenstein being the product of a loving home and having a woman he’s been in love his entire life, serves to make his monomania in bringing the dead back to life even more tragic. He clearly has something to live for and yet chooses to chase death itself blinded both by his ambition and the loss of his mother. Mr. Del Toro’s doctor, however, is broken from the very beginning. He doesn’t descend into tragedy as a result of his mother’s death; he’s born into it as a result of his domineering father, making it far less of a choice and far more of the path he was put upon without his control. Similarly, the fact that he pines for his brother’s bride and tries to seduce her, makes him morally suspect and further positions him as an outcast with nothing to live for. The replacement of the Clerval character is less destructive on the surface, save for continuing the outcast theme, but Mr. Del Toro doesn’t really do anything with it either. After revealing that the uncle has syphilis and his goal in funding Frankenstein’s experiments has been to save himself from death, he falls and cracks his skull open, producing no real impact on anything that comes after. As far as I can tell, the character exists purely as a plot device because Frankenstein needs money for his experiments. Once that was provided, he was literally and figuratively discarded. The differences in the climax are equally revealing. The monster returns in both versions to bargain for his bride, but Mr. Branagh’s Frankenstein remains incapable of truly seeing what he has done or learning any lessons from it yet. Instead, he originally agrees to the plan even after the monster has killed his younger brother. It is only after the monster chooses the body of the woman that was blamed for the murder, that Frankenstein reneges and he does so even knowing that the monster has promised to kill Elizabeth for doing so, telling him that if he doesn’t give him a wedding night, he will be at the doctor’s. Still, he blindly proceeds with the wedding as though the force of nature he’s unleashed can be controlled and even after the monster kills Elizabeth, concludes that he can bring her back to make things right. As a result, he doesn’t fully understand the horror of what he’s done until Elizabeth, back from the dead, an animated corpse, more like a marionette than a human being, immolates herself to escape her fate. Thus, it is her choice to end her own life that prompts his realization instead of his own, rendering his monomania and obsession all consuming until then.
In, Mr. Del Toro’s telling, however, the monster kills his brother, escapes with Elizabeth and then she simply dies, prompting Frankenstein to pursue it to the ends of the Earth. A subtle difference at the end is also illuminating. The monster arrives after Frankenstein is dead in Mr. Branagh’s version, leaving the monster alone to declare “he was my father,” but Mr. Del Toro has the monster arrive in time for a final confrontation, when they refer to each other as father and son. While it is too late to do anything about it, the difference hints that Mr. Branagh’s Frankenstein was never able to truly grasp that he bore responsibility for what he brought into this world, the same as an ordinary father who abandoned his children. He might’ve recognized that his obsession unleashed a tragic evil, but even at the end, he was driven by the same mad revenge as the monster, creating a parallel between the two and a difference between his own loving father. Mr. Del Toro’s monster, on the other hand, appears to simply come to the correct conclusion too late, rather than being incapable of it at all. Regardless, the differences in critical reception could not be more striking. Unlike Mr. Branagh, the critics largely lauded Mr. Del Toro’s effort with the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes giving it more than twice the percentage of positive reviews, leading to the consensus, “Finding the humanity in one of cinema’s most iconic monsters, Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a lavish epic that gets its most invigorating volts from Jacob Elordi’s standout performance.” The New York Times compared it to Paradise Lost, echoing the director’s own thoughts. The Hollywood Reporter said it transcended horror into grand tragedy while achieving a new cinematic scale. Though there were some detractors, what accounts for the difference when both Mr. Branagh and Mr. Del Toro essentially told the same story in I would argue much the same way considering the limitations of mid-1990s film technology and production design? Personally, I would argue that Mr. Branagh crafted something new – visually, thematically, and narratively – that audiences weren’t ready for at the time, but which over time has had a lasting influence. To some extent, the phrase “heavy metal monster movie” encapsulates the idea. Mr. Branagh has never been known as a subtle director. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the camera is unleashed as much as the monster, soaring, twisting, and turning through sets, chewing up the scenery on its own. Further, Mr. Branagh managed to create some truly disturbing, downright bizarre scenes that channel the emotion of the characters directly into the viewer’s heads in a way that’s uncanny, reminding one of David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick at times. James Lowder gave the film a middling review, but noted “the prolonged goop-wrestling that follows the Creature’s birth and the uncomfortable dance scene with Victor and the reanimated Elizabeth tumble right past melodrama into the realm of outright weirdness.”
Back then, this approach wasn’t all that popular. Today, it’s a “sumptuous visual style.” Likewise, when Ms. Maslin referred to the film as “short on villainy but loaded with the tragically misunderstood” she was alluding to the reality that Frankenstein is a tragedy. Mr. Del Toro preferred to reference John Milton, but Mr. Branagh specifically tied it to Hamlet. As he put it, the story is “a family tragedy, like Shakespeare. There are lots of echoes of Hamlet in it, I think. Victor Frankenstein is the opposite side of the same coin as Hamlet. Instead of forming a philosophy of death and our journey toward it, he resists it. He says, ‘Let’s stop them dying and see if we can do it better.’ He replaces Hamlet’s intellectual pursuit with physical action. And still isn’t happy.” From that perspective, it is hard to see how he didn’t craft the superior film whatever the critics may claim. One of the key elements of tragedy is the notion that the protagonist had the potential for greatness, but was felled by a specific, singular flaw. In Hamlet, it’s his inability to place action over intellect, which leads directly to his death; otherwise, as even one of his adversaries, Fortinbras said at the end, he would’ve made a great prince. In Macbeth, it’s ambition; not content to rise naturally to power, he murders for it. In Frankenstein, it’s the relentless pursuit of a single goal above all other things. Interestingly, even in Paradise Lost the devil is depicted as above all other angels save for his pride; he is the best of the best other than God himself until his fall. In Mr. Del Toro’s telling, however, Frankenstein is already a damaged man before he embarks on this quest, making it impossible to see how he was capable of greatness. In Mr. Branagh’s potential was there from the very beginning and we can imagine an alternative world where his mother didn’t die during childbirth, prompting his mad obsession to overshadow all other things. As a result, Mr. Del Toro’s film is not a bad one by any means, but like many others today, one has to wonder why a supposedly gifted story teller would choose to remake what was considered a flop and do it worse. It is is a different Hollywood in more ways than one.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 