It’s Alive – The Monster Arrives and Quickly Dies

Review – Warning, spoilers abound. Okay, I looked forward to the new revisiting of the Frankenstein story with some anticipation, but rather like the creature itself, the movie of “Victor Frankenstein” seems a construction of parts from other movies brought to life by a spark of imagination before being destroyed by its creators, a giant creature with two hearts instead of one, intended to power it for a modern audience, but ultimately ending in an epic failure of hubris. (Currently about 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, fairing a little better with viewers than reviewers). It’s not a bad movie, offering enough entertainment value to fill the time, but rather less than fulfilling the promise of new generational watermark.

There’s something about the opening with its rip off of the “movie” Sherlock Holmes style of stopping the action for a graphic representation of what the characters are sensing, with the music and graphic tone that almost immediate says “hey, I’ve seen this before”, from which it never quite recovers, like a patient with a fatal flaw that will ultimately kill it. The effect is abandoned for most of the movie until the end, when it reappears and you’re head is saying, “oh that’s what that was for”. The film story certainly has some inventive turns and tricks, but staggers unevenly between clever solemnity and buddy comedy. For purists, it has as much in common with the literary “Frankenstein” of Mary Shelley as did “Frankenstein’s Army” but the director, Paul McGuigan, stated on the publicity trail that the book of Frankenstein was boring, so might as well have at it. Victor Frankenstein offers at least one reference to his sewn together creature as “The Modern Prometheus”, so there, but all the rest is pretty much movie iconography references including one lame mispronunciation of the name as Fronkensteen, so you presumably get the Mel Brooks crowd. In fact, the whole Igor as hunchback assistant, mostly comes from the “Young Frankenstein” take. The club scene could have added a tap dance of “Puttin’ On The Ritz”, but that was an opportunity missed.

Victor Frankenstein, neither a doctor, nor a baron, but a bright medical student gathering animal parts from zoos and in this case the circus, where he has cut of a lion’s paw, from some lion we have not seen, witness the circus hunchback perform a medical miracle to save the beautiful trapeze artist performing (without a net), who falls, breaking a collar bone. Frankenstein rescues the hunchback from a cage and in the escape through a clever bit with a mirror, a pursuer is killed. The two are sought for murder by an oh too clever police detective on his own crusade of God verses science.

Victor Frankenstein transforms the hunchback into a fine upstanding young man by draining the puss from a cyst on his back that has somehow also bent his body, straightening his posture with the brace, that also manages to transform a young man who has never left the circus since he was a small child him into an erudite charmer, given the name of Igor, who can now enter London society with the slightest notice, whose medical genius has come from some medical anatomy books, while a London hospital can’t seem to manage to properly medicate a patient with a broken bone.

Victor Frankenstein, who seems to have the skills of the most masterful surgeon of his age while still a student ignoring his studies, and a chiropractor to boot, claims his purpose is to improve mankind but has built a horrid animal monster from decaying flesh in the form of a sort of monstrous monkey that attacks the college theater when shocked into life with his special “Lazarus Fork”, which presumably a wealthy young toff is impressed enough by to be willing to murder to corner the technology market of bringing dead flesh to life.

The God thumping cop closes in on Victor Frankenstein’s London mansion laboratory, without a warrant, mind you, and the whole operation moves, rather like the second super expensive device from Contact, to another location, a remote castle in Scotland belonging to the rich kid, where the creation of a giant man with a heart to spare and extra lungs, turns into an epic failure, when Frankenstein finally realizes he can’t bring back his brother, whose death he feels responsible for in a childhood accident, to the living.

Frankenstein says he wants to create a sentient, intelligent being, but doesn’t seem to take the least precaution, when his animal experiment goes viciously wrong, but decides to proceed on Igor’s suggestion to build a powerful giant, without any thought at all to its mind and that it might have a bad temper being shocked to sudden life by a lightning bolt. The brain consideration only seems to come with some thought of a sequel (I doubt we will ever see). The creature when it comes to life, however briefly, seems to have an uncanny similarity to the monster as drawn for the Mr. Magoo cartoon version of the Frankenstein story, but where in the cartoon, the horrible creature spoke with the intelligence Frankenstein intended, here the monster just pretty muck breaks things before its two hearts become a pin cushion with anatomical directions. And the last line, “this is not life”, a slant riff on the old Colin Clive line “it’s alive” from the 1931 version, as Victor Frankenstein looks in the dead eyes of the botched monster he’s created, discovering that he has not made what he intended,  seems oddly apt for the effort as a whole.