Review: Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Massively Misses the Mark

I have always found myself more conflicted than most when it comes to the filmography of Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro’s aesthetic style and thematic interests have always been quite similar since the beginnings of his career in the early 1990s — his expressions have had consistency from the very beginning, telling stories of fantastical worlds in which monsters are misunderstood and tend to bear more humanity than many of the actual people surrounding them. One needn’t look far into his body of work in order to find evidence of these ideas — it is evident in almost all of his films, from his most popular Spanish-language film Pan’s Labyrinth to Marvel’s Blade II and all the way to his newest film, Frankenstein, his long awaited passion project based upon Mary Shelley’s classic science-fiction/horror novel.

Considering this three decade long (at least) interest in humanising that which is generally deemed monstrous and challenging people who utilise positions of authority in order to commit deeply evil acts, del Toro’s interest in adapting this material is fairly obvious. Even the one work of del Toro’s most easily seen as an outlier within…