Okay, folks: line right up for our review of Hansel and Gretel: Frankenstein Hunters! Wait, I mean I, Van Helsing: Rise of the Angels and Demons. No, no that can't be it . . . Vampires: Werewolves? Bram Stoker's League of Extraordinary Abraham Lincoln Hunters?! Where am I?!
Sorry. I'll try and keep it together here. I, Frankenstein (there we are) is a new fantasy action-adventure film, using all those terms loosely. It's directed by Stuart Beattie but spawned by creator/co-writer/supporting actor Kevin Grevioux, who is responsible for the Underworld films.
And it's not very good.
Let's be clear: I, Frankenstein was never intended to be "good" in the same way that a Rembrandt is "good," and that's just fine with me. But if Guillermo Del Toro's slick Hellboy series was art and entertainment colliding, then I, Frankenstein is art and entertainment as two Druid ex-lovers showing up to the same sacrifice and furiously not-noticing the existence of the other, to the point of awkwardness for the other Druids involved.
The setup is that Frankenstein's monster (played by Aaron Eckhart), after the end of Shelley's novel, takes Victor's corpse a few hundred miles to bury it in the family graveyard. There he stumbles into an eternal war between the demonic forces of Hell and the sacred Gargoyles, created by the Archangel Michael to siphon the rain off buildings and fight bad guys. The Demon Prince Naberius (Bill Nighy) wants Frankenstein (who joins legions of Internet commenters in correcting people left and right that he's not Frankenstein) so he can study him and reanim—look, the end of the human race is a possibility here, that's all anyone needs to know.
The movie's more obvious failures are its least surprising: cardboard characters, plot peppered with non-sequiturs like so many steam-powered crossbow bolts jutting from the torso of a shambling zombie H.P. Lovecraft.
But the special effects and cool fight scenes are nowhere to be seen, either. In short, watching I, Frankenstein is like watching someone else play a video game with all the levels taken out, leaving just a string of cut-scenes behind.
It would be in poor taste to continue to list the reasons readers might not want to see this movie. It's obvious from interviews that Kevin Grevioux and director Stuart Beattie put a lot of time and thought into the world they were creating (a virtue that helped give Underworld a cult following). Evidence abounds of business problems and studio conflicts: the original director was fired, there was a nine-week shoot, the release date was pushed back, and there were many revisions to the original story.
This is probably a shame, because Grevioux actually has a handle on what made Mary Shelley's original novel so brilliant. He agreed with a venerable interpretation of the novel when he said in an interview:
For me, Frankenstein is a character we can identify with, being human, just by virtue of the fact that he essentially is an abandoned child. He was holding his father accountable for creating him and teaching him right and wrong and this creature who was intelligent actually read the Bible and understood what God, the true creator, did for Adam: He taught him right and wrong and he never left him, even after he banished him from the Garden of Eden, he still taught him right and wrong.
And that's what Victor Frankenstein didn't do [for his creation] —and because of that, Frankenstein has this anger inside of him, and he became a monster. Monsters, in particular, make good metaphors of sinful human beings.
Kevin Grevioux wanted to portray something reviled and hated by most of mankind being the very thing that saved it from destruction. That is perhaps the greatest tragedy of I, Frankenstein—that somewhere in the creative process Frankenstein's monster became an Ubermensch.
There is no real attention paid to his brokenness—he carries himself with the grunting swagger of the typical antihero of our times, dressed in a fashionable designer hoodie and trench coat and thrilling the heart of the pretty blonde doctor with a powerful display of abs—which Dr. Victor Frankenstein conveniently did not botch. He kung-fus demons down to hell with easy swipes of his blessed truncheons.
This Victoria's Secret style airbrushing of Frankenstein's monster may have been entirely the result of studio interference—but it's most likely that they simply yielded to certain temptations inherent to this genre.
First of all, I'm a natural fan of this "Eternal Unseen Cosmic Battle Between Good and Evil" genre. The imagery that inspires this stuff is beautiful, from cathedrals and sacred spaces to Gustave Dore's illustrations of Paradise Lost. These movies are part of a resurgence of a Gothic aesthetic, one that (as Victoria Nelson explains in an excellent book) is so popular because people thirst for mystery and the uncanny, especially in a culture so reason- and Enlightenment-driven as ours.
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These tales of cosmic warfare advocate an understanding of the world that has room for the supernatural, which readers of CT appreciate. They season the mind for discussion of principalities and powers, absolute good and evil, religious epistemology, and a host of other issues.
But even I recognize that these stories also hold a Gnostic temptation to dehumanize. For example, the love of the mysterious and unseen can become an obsession that leads to neglecting the boring old neighbor next door. The idea of a hidden World of the Forms can excite our inner narcissist: we all want to be "in" on a secret that others know nothing about, to have mysterious access to the higher order, to be awake and condescend towards the "sheep" around us. Fantasy that has given in to the Manichaean Gnostic temptation is too concerned with the aesthetic of splendor and mysticism to consider the importance of the little things.
This dark side of the genre's force has no wish to see the cosmic struggle condescend to include crude things, but only immortals—Adam Frankenstein, instead of Frankenstein's pathetic creature.
Contrast this with two HBO television series I recently started watching: True Detective and Carnivale. Both borrow from the realm of the pulpy and the fantastic. True Detective takes its very name from one of the old pulp mags, and features two homicide detectives in backwoods Louisiana who are assigned to investigate a pagan ritual sacrifice. Carnivale sets the war between good and evil in the Depression, when an orphan boy who has taken up with a traveling carnival begins to display spiritual powers.
Both portray a conflict between good and evil. They do so not by showing a UFC cage match between an angel and a demon, but by telling tales with casts of cops with struggling marriages, trailer trash, whores, giants, workaholics, little people, bearded ladies, psychics, and people with bad teeth and zero abs.
These shows also have great writing, production design, acting, and everything else on their side. But the way they mix Gothic with American Grit is a good reminder that the Guy a lot of people think will actually win whatever cosmic battle is really out there decided to lay in a manger, hang with dirty fishermen, and get nailed to a tree before karate chopping the Prince of Darkness in the face for the last time, with all the badass angelic hosts at his command.
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Focusing on one half of that paradox or the other can still lead to good stories. But the very best, I think, will acknowledge both.
Caveat Spectator
I, Frankenstein is pretty tame, as far as PG-13 standards go. There are fight scenes, but no blood or gratuitous deaths. Refreshingly, there is no female half-nudity - a shared glance between Frankenstein and the scientist is about as close to romance as things get. Discerning viewers will want to be warned of scary images, including transformations of humans into demons and an underground collection of corpses. Overall, the film is macabre in tone, but there's nothing in terms of objectionable content to necessarily prevent young people with a thirst for adventure from seeing this one. (But for plenty of other reasons, see above.)
Timothy Wainwright is a writer based in New York City. He enjoys writing about culture, politics, and religion. You can follow him on Twitter at @Tim_Wainwright.