As a sort of sequel to this thread, tonight I'm going to watch Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), dir. Kenneth Branagh

Aside from a similar choice re: the title, Francis Ford Coppola is a credited producer, and it's under American Zoetrope's banner https://twitter.com/sapphixy/status/1302062057366450177

I know I watched this one once before, a year or two after its theatrical release, but my memory of it is pretty thin; that it didn't make that much of an impression on me, unlike Bram Stoker's Dracula, is already kind of damning

I read Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (to give the novel its full title, complete with punctuation) when I was in high school, and one of the things that struck me (other than "wow, Victor is a *dick*") was that, despite the "assembled from corpses" method being the …

assumption of pop culture because of early adaptations (in particular, the 1931 film directed by James Whale), Shelley never described how Victor constructed the Creature, and this was an in-character decision by Victor, who didn't want knowledge of the process disseminated

If anything, I always read it as him somehow assembling it from chemical ingredients, given that alchemy is explicitly cited in the text, and his decision to build it to heroic proportions is motivated by the difficulty in replicating finer structures in sufficiently small scales

The first adaptation I remember watching was a 1992 made-for-cable version that aired on TNT, starring Patrick Bergin as Victor and Randy Quaid (really!) as the Creature; it featured an electrochemical process that made the Creature a sort of clone of Victor

Victor and the Creature shared a psychic link, as a result of the process, and the abortive would-be mate would have had a similar link to Elizabeth

I honestly have no gauge for how good a film that was, because it was so long ago, but props for an original creation method

With all that said: let's plunge in, shall we?

I really do like how the frame story is handled, although it's considerably less sedate than the novel, in which the captain has time to record everything as Victor relates it to him

"you must think of her as your own sister"

yeah, um, about that

The first thing I can remember seeing Helena Bonham Carter in is Hamlet (1990), opposite Mel Gibson, but honestly her appearance in Fight Club has come to dominate how I see her in everything else

A deviation from the novel: here, Victor's mother dies giving birth to his much younger brother William, but in the novel she dies from scarlet fever

This is alluded to in the film by being what killed Elizabeth's parents, while in the novel she's the orphaned scion of a …

dispossessed Italian noble family

And I'm pretty sure Justine's mother isn't in the novel, although I could be wrong

In the novel Victor's motivation is sheer thirst for knowledge, for the thrill of exploring new frontiers, while in this version it's explicitly to defeat death, which gives him a level of sympathy that I don't really think is needed

And it does kinda undermine the parallel with Captain Walton's motivation

One of the errors noted on the Dracula IMDb page is that the costumes are about ten years out of date

I'm now wondering about the accuracy of this film's costumes