Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I was never that interested in the Universal Monster Movie Universe until the last few years. They just always existed and I didn’t even learn until recently that basically every “canon” classic monster was owned by the same studio. I was particularly disinterested in the sequels and crossovers that were obviously naked cash grabs.

But much like slasher movies, I’ve come to recognize the cultural importance of these movies and feel like I have a gap without them. And not only does this one seem to have almost as much of a long shadow as the original Frankenstein movie, I’ve heard it described as when Universal’s monster movies reached a level of technical and artistic sophistication that can be said to be coming into their own. I still have a lot of gap, but I can see where the earliest movies are not quite what I think the platonic ideal of a Universal Monster Movie is.

I know there’s a new doctor making the Bride in this one. I think I read that the Monster forces him to make a partner for him, so I guess this new character is more reluctant than arrogant and maniacal.

After watching the movie:

Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, and their friend Lord Byron recall the time she gave them a revolutionary fright with the tale of Frankenstein, recapping how at the end Dr. Frankenstein was thrown off a tower by his creation and the monster himself burned in the collapsing tower. When the men complain about the abrupt ending, Mary tells them that wasn’t the ending after all. It turns out that everyone was mistaken about Frankenstein, who was just barely alive from the fall, and about the monster, who emerged from the wreckage only slightly singed. Recovering with his new wife by his side, Henry Frankenstein, now Baron Von Frankenstein, considers his experience a warning and decides to put away his quest for the secrets of life forever, which lasts about a day until his old university mentor, the now disgraced Dr. Pretorius comes to him hoping to collaborate. Pretorius’s own research into the secrets of life proceeded from the other direction, starting with “seeds” and making miniature homunculi, but he believes their combined knowledge could create a more perfect life than Frankenstein’s first attempt. Frankenstein tries to refuse, but when the Monster, now able to form mostly monosyllabic sentences thanks to the friendship of a blind man who thought only a normal mute had stumbled into his home, finds Pretorius, Pretorius recognizes his strength and pliability as an asset, and with the Monster’s help, compels Frankenstein to assist him in creating an Eve to match his Adam.

I did not realize going into this movie that the blind man sequence that I’d seen before was part of this movie. I had assumed it was part of the original, but this movie has taken a lot from the book that the original movie left behind. I think it’s used some of the best subplots, and this makes me interested in going back to the first movie to see what was left when some of what I think was the most compelling part of the book was deleted.

There is a lot of this movie, especially the opening retcon, that feels like things are being announced to us rather than happening organically. But naturalistic acting wasn’t the style yet. Even though cinema has definitely become its own thing in a lot of ways, this is still very much like a play that’s getting extra help from the camerawork, and while there’s more complex emotional work here than the earlier talkies, the writing still feels a little more broad and simplified than what a play would’ve been able to do at the same time.

The shadow this movie casts is almost entirely from the last five minutes. Where the original story is not nearly as concerned with how Victor Frankenstein made life as the consequences of him failing to think beyond the achievement of that goal, this movie is entirely leading up to the new creation, which lasts about as long as the famous tableau before everything falls apart and suddenly the movie is over.

Pretorius is pretty much the exact opposite of what I pictured. Frankenstein made his first Creation not knowing what would happen. Pretorius heard about everything that happened and said “if I knew what he learned, I could do better”. Frankenstein himself has little resemblance to his pop cultural image, and although some of that is because he’s trying to renounce it, I think this continuity’s version is just a much more reasonable person than he’s made out to be, and more in line with the tortured young man in the book who consistently fails to take responsibility for his actions than the caricature he’s become.

This was mostly a worthwhile movie, thanks in no small part to the leftovers of Mary Shelley’s work that the original didn’t have time for. I have to wonder if the Creation was ever portrayed as sympathetically within this cinematic universe again before he fell into just being the brainless brute undead murderer audiences paid to be scared by. I’m not sure I’ll be interested in seeing it again, but I’m more open to it than some others in the franchise.