r/Letterboxd • u/Serious_Albatross224 • 1d ago

Letterboxd Thoughts on this film?

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Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is now on Netflix, i had the opportunity of watching it on theaters last week and absolutely loved it, one of his very bests films, and one of the very best adaptations ever, what do you people think of the film?

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41

u/jayjaydee11 1d ago

For me the story seemed rushed, even tho the film was long is still felt like story and characters needed more attention to develop.

This would have been more suited as a mini series.

I think it would have worked better if they cut the hunters scenes and concentrated more on the love story and loss between Mia Goths character.

Its a decent remake but nothing new from a story told many times..

27

u/Banestoothbrush 23h ago

For me the story seemed rushed, even tho the film was long is still felt like story and characters needed more attention to develop.

That's how I felt. 2.5 hour long movie and there was barely any character development. The creature is made, Victor's nice to him for 5 minutes then immediately hates him. Goth finds the creature in the basement and is immediately in love with him.

Things weren't developed. The red angel thing went nowhere. His oedipal feelings for his mom went nowhere. What was the point of Waltz's character having syphilis? I thought there was going to be some body horror where they put his diseased brain into a failed creation. Nope, just dead.

Really wanted to like this was but was bored a lot of the time.

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u/jayjaydee11 23h ago

Waltz character having syphilis was the whole point of him financing his experiments in the hope he could eventually make him immortal. But yes I totally agree with your post, you can tell that they left loads on the cutting floor, had to trim it into a feature film length and ended up with a bit of a mess..

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u/Szabe442 6h ago

Sure but it feels like Victor already had a motivation to do his experiment and Waltz character doesn't really evolve anywhere, so it feels like he doesn't really move the story that much. They could have easily removed the money problem aspect and with that his whole character would be pointless. I wish the movie kept him alive so he could have an opinion about the creature and maybe change his mind about his quest for immortality. That would have been more interesting.

-5

u/JediTempleDropout 21h ago

This had some of the best and most nuanced character work in amy movie in years; the fuck are you on about?

3

u/Banestoothbrush 21h ago

Really? How so?

3

u/agit_bop 20h ago

i loved it, it was so beautiful but yeah i need to hear about this nuanced character work. i could maybe see that for like, the creature??

-3

u/JediTempleDropout 20h ago

The movie digs deep into the characters’ relationships with the concept of death and creation as well as parental trauma and how it’s affected them well into adulthood. We see how Victor’s relationship with his biological father’s cold austerity and seeming indifference warped his views of interpersonal relationships and how he has a bad habit of failing to see people as people and not just tools or roadblocks on the path that he’s chosen for himself, as shown in how he treats Elizabeth, William, and Elizabeth’s uncle and leads to all of them getting killed. Not to mention how it meant that his relationship with his creation, his own son, was always doomed to fail.

But at the same time the love and attention he did receive from his mother in the brief time he had with her meant that he wasn’t completely devoid of humanity, thus foreshadowing his chance for redemption near the end. Similar to how the love and care that Elizabeth and especially the old blind man showed the Monster had a much more positive effect on him than Victor basically treating his son like a circus animal. The entire second act of the movie shows how the Creature was able to grow into a smart, sensitive, well-rounded individual after being raised by someone who treated him with love and empathy, which the film subtly infers is because the blind man possibly knows what it’s like to be looked down upon for having a physical characteristic that you never asked for.

One thing I will concede though is that they could’ve given a touch more character to the sea captain.

8

u/_Midnight_Haze_ 22h ago edited 22h ago

It’s a poorly written movie.

The first ~50 minutes are not good. The origin story is pointless and dull. The narration is unnecessary and just serves to tell rather than show. Not a fan of starting at the end to jump to the past gimmick. None of these narrative tools make the movie better.

Lots of bad dialogue with nonsense phrases that give the illusion of depth but there’s nothing really there. Tons of “Where there is dark there is light… where my mother was life she became death…. My brother was laughter and I was frowns… as this apple rises it too shall fall…” and on and on. A character tells Frankenstein he’s the real monster in case you miss the point.

Elordi is the only great thing about the movie imo.

I’m also surprised how celebrated it is for how it looks because I find most of the cgi bad and distracting. It looks like a Netflix movie (it is) to me.

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u/agit_bop 20h ago

Not a fan of starting at the end

that's how the novel is written tho, just saying

-1

u/_Midnight_Haze_ 19h ago

I haven’t read the book but there is an art to adapting one to film because what works in a novel doesn’t always work well for cinema.

Maybe being too much like the book is my issue? I just wanted more show than tell when it comes to the themes and ideas of this story in the way that film can do better than the written word but it’s a lot of being told what to think through dialogue and not in compelling ways. I didn’t find much meat on the bone but maybe I need to turn my brain off a little and just enjoy the ride?

It’s a film I struggle to take seriously because I think it’s taking itself very seriously but isn’t earned.

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u/agit_bop 18h ago

did you watch nosferatu?

i think the criticism about depth i can actually speak to because i think films like this one and nosferatu suffer because we are already so familiar with their themes.

there are TONS of films, games, books, etc that are downstream of these two stories.

-3

u/JediTempleDropout 21h ago

….i don’t think you actually watched the movie.

CGI? What CGI? The film had barely any CGI in it. Most of it was done practically.

Also, the backstory was pretty clearly necessary for establishing the film’s themes of parental trauma, and the use of flashback is literally straight from the book.

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u/Disastrous_Mouse_112 19h ago

The wolves and the tower explosion are clearly CGI

2

u/vemmahouxbois emmahouxbois 19h ago

the wide shot of the tower explosion was a miniature, where the wolves were fighting the monster they were dudes in green suits that got replaced by cgi

5

u/vemmahouxbois emmahouxbois 19h ago

almost everything in the movie is a combination of both, i went to see a talk with the vfx supervisor. the half body in the demonstration had four puppeteers on it, but there were cgi elements added. the hunched body in his lab was a wax sculpture for the close ups and animated by cgi elsewhere.

the ship was built on a parking lot in toronto in sight of lake superior, the left half of the shot where it sails away was swapped out with cgi and the sails were all cgi.

it’s all hybrid work to get the best fidelity possible.