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I, Frankenstein Review

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(We apologise for the dreadful mangling of Yvonne Strahovski’s name in this video)

I comma Frankenstein is an action packed movie starting Eckhart comma Aaron as Frankenstein apostrophe s monster, a ripped version of the traditionally ripped up animated corpse. He has all the badly healed scars, no bolts though his head, and is not bright green. In fact mostly he looks and sounds like Aaron Eckhart plus a lot of lines and minus an octave. The events of the book happen roughly to tune, before he gets involved in a war between angel-analogues disguised as gargoyles which turn into humans, and demons (who don’t get analogs) disguised as humans who turn into demons. Hijinks ensue.

My standard geek objection starts with the title, in that Frankenstein is the name of the scientist – Victor Frankenstein – rather than the monster, who is named in the novel “Adam”, which is very conveniently what the side of order decide to call him here. The film, however, deals with this discrepancy both promptly and adroitly in the first quarter-hour or so, and that is notable, because it’s the last adroit thing the film does for the following 75 minutes.

If you enjoy subtle films, then this is the wrong movie.

If you enjoy fight sequences with cuts longer than a second and a half, this is the wrong movie for you.

If, in fact, you enjoy fight scenes that deviate from swish blade-a though newly-created-slot-b, this is the wrong movie for you.

If you do not enjoy CGI effects, this is the wrong movie for you.

And, thinking about it, if you are Aaron Eckhart, Yvonne Strahovski or Bill Nighy, this is not the movie for you.

It’s nice to see Yvonne Strahovski out of the fake american accent from Chuck, and she gets a lot to do here as the sceptical scientist hired by the bad guys. While she ends up being a Damsel later in the movie, it’s because she’s too competent for the bad guys to let her go, rather than merely to further plot point Scruffy White Male . That said, she spends most of her time with the bad guys doing awesome-science-stuff, and most of the time with the good guys looking pretty and being party healer.

Bill Nighy manages to undersell being evil, a phrase I wasn’t expecting.

Eckhart has fun action hero stuff, but like everybody else in the entire movie is desperately seeking a third dimension for his character to evolve towards. Relentlessly self-interested, tormented because he doesn’t have a soul, he has a Crowning Moment Of Character Arc point late in act 3 which would have been glorious if there had been any – *ANY* – action or dialog from the character leading to it, rather than others saying he isn’t there yet. Nighy’s a straight line towards evil, and the good guys are mostly divided between Doesn’t Trust Main Character, Trusts Main Character, and Background Fighty Dude. The closest thing to a character with more than one level of thought is the Gargoyle Queen.

It all leads up to the obvious massive fight that suffers from the increasing problem of everybody turning into their super-saiyan CGI forms for the final climax.

Somewhere below the film is a fleshed out world, with political ramifications, with character detail and reason, where the weight of immortality borne by Frankenstein Monster is something more than being taciturn and untrusting. On the ethics of the fringes of science, on the balance of power between the sides of Order and of Chaos. There is, in short, an interesting and action-packed film about the final battle between Order and Chaos, somewhere in the history of this movie. Maybe it’s in the comic book series it was based on, but it’s flung forth here as a disjointed, shallow, cardboard cut-out of a film, burning merrily in its own apocalypse.