Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was a genuine masterpiece, and his movie was the closest that Hollywood has ever come to bringing Mary Shelley’s novel to the big screen. The classic Universal Horror movies made Frankenstein’s Monster a tragic being. Still, he was also someone who killed people, despite being mostly an innocent newborn in the grand scheme of things. However, Guillermo del Toro approached the story with the utmost respect, both for Shelley’s original tale and for the idea that this Creature was never a monster at all, and it was the Creature who deserved the most respect. What resulted was a loyal movie, but not one that was purely beholden to the written word.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a movie that brings a lot of Mary Shelley’s ideas to the big screen, but it also makes some necessary changes that improve the Creature tremendously.
Guillermo Del Toro Includes the Ship Captain
It is a little shocking to see Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein start without Frankenstein or his creature, but with a ship’s captain, trying to get his boat out of an ice trap. However, that is precisely how Mary Shelley’s novel also opens. The captain’s name changes, as it is Robert Walton writing letters to his sister in the book, but it is Captain Anderson simply dealing with his crew in this movie. However, both have the ships stuck in the ice, and both have the captains discovering Victor Frankenstein stranded on the ice, seeking help.
Del Toro Makes Changes to Frankenstein’s Story
One significant change is that Guillermo del Toro takes a lot of time on Frankenstein’s childhood and past before getting to the main story. In both versions, Frankenstein tells the captain his story, but in the movie, he goes into great detail about his childhood, how demanding his father was on him and his mother, and how his mother’s death is what pushed him to seek to find a way to conquer death. However, the movie changes even more than that.
In the book, Frankenstein has a friend named Henry who helps him, while in the movie, it is instead a man named Henrich Harlander, the uncle of Elizabeth, who wants him to succeed in his goals because Henrich has a dark secret he is hiding. The movie also changes Elizabeth. Instead of Victor’s fiancée, she is set to marry Frankenstein’s brother, William, and she actively despises everything about Victor, despite his falling in love with her from a distance. It changes their entire dynamic, and that leads to one of the movie’s greatest triumphs and tragedies.
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The Creature Is Not a Senseless Murderer in This Frankenstein Movie
Mary Shelley’s novel goes to great lengths to show that the Creature becomes a cold and calculated murderer in his attempts to make Frankenstein pay for abandoning him. When Victor abandons his creation and leaves the Creature to survive on its own in the book, the Creature murders Victor’s friend Henry. He then goes on to kill Frankenstein’s bride, Elizabeth, on their wedding day. The Creature wants to make Frankenstein pay for his crimes, and everyone he kills is because of his hatred for his maker.
The movie takes the opposite direction, and it makes it even better than Mary Shelley’s story. The Creature here does kill some people, but only those who tried to hurt him or hurt the people he grew to care about. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone and wants to have companionship. Furthermore, the Creature never would have killed Elizabeth because she is one of the few people who treated him kindly. It is Frankenstein himself who accidentally kills Elizabeth, actively murders her uncle Henrich, and is guilty of his own brother’s death. The Creature kills no one who doesn’t deserve it. His hatred for Frankenstein is justified.
The Creature Tells the Captain His Story Here
The movie also makes one drastic change to the story of Frankenstein and his Creature. In the film, the Creature arrives on the ship while Frankenstein is telling his story. Then the Creature tells the captain his side of the story, from his survival after Castle Frankenstein burns down to the reason he was hunting Victor across the world. This allowed some significant changes, but it also helped the Creature’s story.
Mary Shelley’s novel also had the Creature tell his story, but he said it to Frankenstein when he was asking for a Bride. He asked for the Bride as well in the movie, and in both cases, Frankenstein ended up stopping and refusing to create another “monster” to bring into the world. However, with the Creature telling his side of the story on the ship, while Victor was still alive, it had more meaning as the captain listened to the tale.
Guillermo del Toro Keeps the Creature Sympathetic Here
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein is the monster, and the Creature is an innocent victim in the face of all these horrors. This was shown clearly at the end of the story when the captain finds the Creature on the ship, crying over the dead body of Victor. When asked why the Creature would cry after all the evil he has done, he admits that now that Victor is gone, he can finally die himself.
The truth is that, in the book, Victor was responsible for his friend’s death, his Bride’s death, and even his father’s dying of heartbreak. Yes, the Creature killed them, but it was because of Victor’s actions. Even when Frankenstein died, he refused to accept responsibility for his role in these tragedies. However, at the end, the Creature took responsibility for his actions, proving he was more human than Victor was.
Guillermo del Toro took that one step further. By having the Creature find Frankenstein still alive, and telling his incredible story to the captain, Victor finally understood, and he asked for the Creature’s forgiveness before dying. Del Toro made Frankenstein at least get some redemption at the end of his movie. However, by keeping the Creature’s hands mostly clean and taking away all the vengeful murders he committed in the book, Frankenstein was the only real monster here. This Creature was always a tragic creation, and he never deserved the pain he received.
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