Mary Shelley

This film tells the story of Mary, the daughter of two literary stars. The story concentrates on her life, and the circumstances which inspired her famous story "Frankenstein".

The story is very good because it captures emotions wonderfully. From love, jealousy, loneliness, disappointment, arrogance and despair, emotions are skilfully displayed on screen. I find the story captivating, and I am drawn to the characters' less than fortunate world.

A wonderfully adapted script & casted perfectly for Elle Fanning & Bel Powley. The movie does great justice & entertains you with a wonderful script with flowing poetry and proper English as spoken in the years past. The motivation, inspiration of ones passion, desires and disappointment's allowing Mary to pen her words to a great story are told and performed exquisitely by Elle Fanning who is truly becoming an incredible actress. So if you want a good movie for an adult date night, here you go. Enjoy!

I always make the time to read IMDB's user reviews before I waste my time on a movie. For some reason I decided not to on this evening, as I was eternally bored with my own existence. The experience of watching Mary Shelley has made me reconsider my tactic of choosing movies based on user reviews, as we all have such diverse taste in an artists work, we should not let the audiences opinions hold too much merit over our own taste. I enjoyed the movie from start to end, and the actors did a wonderful job at the portrayal of their characters. I have taken the time to dive to deep into Mary Shelley's life story, so I do not know how true this story is to her life, but the movie did manage to keep my attention for just over two hours and entertained me over the course of that time. I must say this movie managed to spark a deep interest in me for the young author of Frankenstein, and I shall now proceed to do more research on the infamous Mary Shelley.

My wife and I enjoyed this movie, we watched it at home on DVD from our public library.

If you are not a literary expert, like I am not, you know of "Frankenstein" and you might even know it was a book written by Mary when she was still a teenager in the early 1800s. But most of us know little to nothing of British and European society at that time, and how low a moral character poets such as her eventual husband, Shelley, and their friend Lord Byron were. The poetry is revered, the men who wrote not so much so. Mary had to be strong to endure.

Anyways this is a good movie, although perhaps a bit slow at 2 hours. Elle Fanning who apparently also was still a teenager when this was filmed is really good as Mary Shelley from about 16 to about 18, and the movie goes a long way to portray the influences in her early life. She did write other books but they seemingly were not particularly studied until fairly recently.

So, do we think of her as a "one hit wonder?"

Mary Shelley: This film is a tad confused as it tries to fit so much into a 2 hour running time. There is the romance between Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth) and Mary Wollstonecraft (Elle Fanning); her freethinking father William Godwin (Stephen Dillane); her deceased mother Mary Wollstonecraft the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; the affair between Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley) and Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge); then there is the tale of the Swiss villa where the Frankenstein story was conceived. Mary even has a nasty stepmother (Joanne Froggatt).

Booth and Fanning both look exceedingly pretty and it's certainly lust if not love at first sight but somehow there are no real sparks in the relationship. Shelley is a cad who has deserted his wife and child and now hopes to have free love with Mary and more on the side. The real fire rages between Powley and Sturridge even if his Byron portrayal is somewhat reminiscent of Jason Isaacs plying Zhukov. The Swiss scenes where Frankenstein was thought up are surprisingly low key with Polidori (Ben Hardy) providing the main interest.

This might have worked better as a six hour TV mini-series. 6/10.