Toying with Wrathful forces: How Frankenstein’s Monster Has Been Adopted in Film
Since its publication in 1818, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, has attracted a plethora of adaptations ranging from cartoons, plays, novels, movies and television programs. One such adaptation is the movie, “Victor Frankenstein”, starring James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliff as Victor Frankenstein and his aide respectively. The movie was released in November 11 2015, as a film adaptation of the novel with contemporary elements added to the 200-year old science-fiction horror story. A link to the movie is https://fmovies.se/film/victor-frankenstein.09m3/4qv65k.
The film was directed by Paul McGuigan, and produced by Davis Entertainment and TSG Entertainment companies, with 20th Century Fox being its distributor. The film first premiered in Los Angeles. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein through the eyes of his aide, Igor. Although the story of the movie follows the general idea of the novel about an artificial creature created by a scientist, which turns out to be a huge monster, it side tracks from the original story in various aspects, and attempts to offer various explanations which the author left out of the novel.
The first interesting thing I noticed about this film is that it attempts to respond to Shelley’s novel by explaining how the monster was created. The movie begins by stating that a lot is remembered about the monster, but not the man, and it adds that sometimes the monster is the man. This implies that what Victor Frankenstein created, although accidentally, might have been a version of himself. Additionally, it is also interesting to see that the original story didn’t explain how exactly Frankenstein created the monster, except for the information that Dr. Frankenstein discovers an important principle of life which was not known to basic scientists. In the film, however, the scientist is shown to use body parts stolen from corpses and shocked by electricity. The film also shows how the monster is killed by its creators, which departs from the original story in which the monster decided to kill itself out of guilt.
Notably, at some points, the film adaptation departs from the story line in the original novel, but at certain points, the two stories seem synchronized. For example, while the entire first chapter of the novel is dedicated to offering a background of the main character as a child, and his family (including mother, father, siblings and future wife), the film adaptation only focuses on Frankenstein’s life as an adult. Chapter two of the novel shows that Frankenstein attends the lecture by Mr. Waldman, which was when he begins to love physical sciences, especially chemistry. The earlier segments of the film capture Frankenstein’s enthusiasm with physical sciences, and how this leads him to make the monster.
Additionally, the film and the book also share some thematic similarities, including fiction, horror and ethical issues that arise from experiments involving corpses and human life. In both versions, the scientist is portrayed as a man struggling to kill his creation after realizing that it is vicious and may cause more harm than good.