Frankenstein di Mary Shelley

I nearly spit out my teeth when I saw how low Frankenstein (94) score was. This film is quite simply spectacular! It goes in the same category as From Hell, they are both too sophisticated and beautiful to be JUST horror films. The cleverness of this film and its sheer radiance must throw some people off. Robert De Niro is the creature! De Niro gives the foul beast a soul of his own. De Niro's performance brings out genuine pity, sorrow, and most importantly, fear. Kenneth Branagh has always added a bit of class to his films, and his version of Frankenstein is no different. A visually brilliant triumph as a director.

When this first came out I thought it was a masterpiece. I was also a young man and had not experienced too many films yet. While this is still probably the best Frankenstein film IMO, in a recent viewing I was shocked to find that I really didn't hold it as high of regard as I did. Branaghs acting is way over the too and quite ridiculous even. I saw many things in the plot lines that are what I call lazy screenplay writing. Certain events were so forced by the charachters unrealistic actions that a lot of this film seemed quite silly. Deniro is really the main reason to watch the film. His performance was still quite good IMO. All in all this was a pleasant memory that didn't hold water for me personally with a more mature mindset. Still some great stuff in the film though.

Victor Frankenstein is the son of a famous doctor who watches his mother die in labour with his younger brother. As an idealistic young man he travels to university to study to become a great doctor. However he brings with him non-scientific teachings he has researched into life and the influence of electric currents. His belief is supported by shadowy lecturer Dr Waldeman and Frankenstein continues his work and brings a man back to life using parts of other men. Realising what he has done, Frankenstein leaves his monster to die but the creature learns fast and wants revenge for his creation.

I have seen far too many monster movies that all blur together and share the same focus on effects and gore than story or character. So when this was promoted as being close to the original material, dark and more of a story than a horror I was looking forward to watching it. For the most part it sort of works but it's main flaw runs all the way through it like a stick of rock – it's far too worthy. Or at least it thinks it is. The film has a constant swell of dramatic music that is only ever seconds away and it really makes the film feel grander and more serious than it really is. The film isn't scary but that wasn't a problem to me – it just has all these big worthy dialogue scenes with sudden pauses (up comes the music) and then lines. It doesn't work and the film feels heavy and even dull as a result.

This is never more evident than in Branagh's own performance. He is far too dashing and too much of a young man gone wrong to be believed. If he'd played it a little less worthy he would have been more of a human and less a cardboard type. De Niro really tries hard and did well for me. He may be stuck with a creature but it has been developed past the cliché (but not far enough perhaps). I did feel for him and it was all De Niro's doing. Carter is miscast both before and after – far to light and modern for the role, Briers is OK but Cleese is way to miscast. First of all the fact that he only appears half in shadows and when he opens his mouth the music comes up doesn't help, but it didn't feel like him. Quinn is a good cameo but the majority of the cast seem to have bought into the whole `worthy' thing and are dulled as a result.

Overall the film is worth watching because it is a good telling of the classic tale and De Niro does a good job of showing us the basic human behind the combined dead body parts. If only Branagh hadn't been overwhelmed by the sheer importance of what he thought he was doing and had let the film flow and bit more and given in less to worthy music, acting and directing.

... Francis Coppola's hit with Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and which sank quickly at the theaters for not following in its parent's footsteps--Coppola had other projects, tried to give it to another director, and ended up with one of Kenneth Branagh's first few attempts at non-Shakespeare movies, which Coppola later tried to distance himself from. It's also one of the most omnipresent of the Sony/Columbia Orphans, just about every-darn-where on streaming (if your service has "Gattaca", "Fifth Element", "Resident Evil", "Last Action Hero", "Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" and "Dracula", rest assured this one will be nearby), and I'd thought I should finally get around to streaming it just to be curious about why it hadn't lived up to its pedigree in the theaters.

It's actually not bad, now that we know what to expect: Branagh's since moved away from Shakespeare (after "Hamlet", he could never get another one back in theaters), and now specializes in gloriously overproduced period epics with costume/production-design abandon. Back in 1994, we didn't think of Ken as "the director of Marvel's Thor and Disney's live-action Cinderella", but now that we do, it's a full-tilt exercise in period-production budget. Like Coppola's film, the idea was to (claim to) go back and explore the themes of the original novel, and Ken's performance and Frank Darabont's script does a good job with that, showing Victor Frankenstein as a privileged rich-kid medical student destroying everything for his one personal obsession, in a Regency-steampunk lab powered by electric eels instead of Universal-Horror lightning. Robert DeNiro is intended to play the monster, and does a good job with the book's idea of a verbose creature who questions his own existence, but he's playing it a little too DeNiro--With just a few stitch-scars and a big cloak, he comes off not so much as an unearthly creation, but more like the escaped criminal that Pip met at the beginning of "Great Expectations".

It's good viewing if you take the movie at its own face value--There's one scene that deliberately tries to copy Coppola's abstract, dreamlike "Dracula" style, presumably to give in to Francis's complaints, and it sticks out from the rest of the movie like a sore thumb. The movie goes at Branagh's own wildly enthusiastic cosplay pace, and like his Hamlet movie, Ken's default style seems to be, when in doubt, shoot the scene Big. The story's attempt to top itself at every plot point does start going a little overwrought by the climax, but we realize that while he may not have made a Coppola followup, what he's done is create the world's most expensive Hammer film...Which is not always a bad thing.

Written by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont (who later disowned this film) and ambitiously directed by Kenneth Branagh, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a likable film which succeeds mostly in a refreshingly old-fashioned, Hammeresque vein. (I think Christopher Lee hated this movie and equally class-dripping Bram Stoker's Dracula because he felt that they were competing in the same area.) There's the classic monsters (Robert DeNiro!), the period sets, the lovely heroines in the lovely period costumes, the beautiful and suitably turbulent score... Certainly not a perfect film, but as a classy, gorgeous monster movie, it is a woefully underrated one.