FRANKENSTEIN- GUILLERMO DEL TORO

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was really a dry run for Bladerunner and the expectations that we now have of artificial intelligence. And as with those fears the whole thing is based on a problem. That problem is that it is perfectly obvious that, if we are still in the dark about the actual nature of human being 300 years after René Descartes was dissecting corpses vainly hoping to find the location of the soul in the pineal gland, it cannot but be impossible to replicate such a creature. In spite of the best efforts of the neuro-scientists, we still simply don't know how free will, human selfhood or intelligence are instantiated. This leaves the AI worriers, Mary Shelley and del Toro with a paradox; if you are suggesting that it is hubristic, not to say impossible to create what a creator God or Evolution (tick box accordingly according to your beliefs) somehow delivered how are they going to create a notional creature who is supposed to have been created by a hubristic Enlightenment scientist who got above his station? What on Earth will that “creature” be like? Guillermo del Toro seems to adopt the Mary Shelley version; a sweet and guileless amalgam of high-minded Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage who just wants a friend. If you can willingly suspend disbelief over this insuperable paradox the film, as with the book, is tremendous High-Romantic fun. There is the killer line nicely delivered by the Monster in the film to Victor Frankenstein – “You are the true monster” because his hubris, in trying to replace God or Evolution (tick box accordingly according to your beliefs) is the real moral monstrousness in the story. The Heath Robinson, mixed grill appearance of the monster created suitably mocks the comical pretensions of his human creator. And there is a lot of fabulous architecture of the High Gothic/Art Nouveau comic book, dreamscape type we expect from Del Toro. There is an extraordinary Gothic tower perched on the edge of a cliff which doubles as Frankenstein’s lab and reminds one of Gotham City and an electricity sub-station at the same time. There are shades of Jekyll and Hyde in old style Victorian dissection theatres in Edinburgh and there is even a fine dash of Pre-Raphaelite-ism in the spectacle of Frankenstein’s prospective sister-in-law, played by Mia Goth, perched in the corner of a coach in a cloud of turquoise muslin like a sitter for John Everett Millais. Oh, and there are obviously AI (is CGI passé now?) deer and wolves which seems appropriate somehow. And I can tell Gerald Sholto, who loves Mary Shelley’s closing sequence, that this version begins in fine rerum.