Frankenstein: A Review - Guillermo del Toro's Lifeless Monster

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you’re a monster movie maniac like me then watch it out of curiosity, but just know this disappointing movie isn’t anywhere near as good as it could, and should, have been.

Frankenstein, written and directed by acclaimed auteur Guillermo del Toro, recounts the famous Mary Shelley tale of man’s cursed attempt at playing God.

The film, which stars Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz and Jacob Elordi, is currently streaming on Netflix and is also available in some theatres, for those inclined to see it on the big screen.

As someone who truly loves Mary Shelley’s book, slavishly adores the 1931 James Whale Frankenstein movie, and is also a great admirer of Guillermo del Toro, it is a massive understatement to say that I was greatly anticipating this version of Frankenstein.

Every year come October, I make a pilgrimage to the Universal Monster Classics and my first watch is always Frankenstein – as it is my favorite of the bunch. That moody and mesmerizing movie is considerably different from Shelley’s book, but it is one of those rare cases where both the book and movie are great despite their differences.

As for Guillermo del Toro…I really dig his work too. I was one of the few who was happy when he won Best Picture/Best Director for The Shape of Water…which I found to be a psychologically and mythologically insightful film.

Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is an emotionally powerful, politically vibrant and cinematically imaginative masterwork. His Nightmare Alley is an underrated gem, a true nightmare of a movie.

Del Toro’s last film before Frankenstein was 2022’s Pinocchio, an animated musical. Despite being allergic to musicals and wary of some animation, I thought that was a brilliant piece of work – both poignant and profound.

And so it was that I was greatly anticipating seeing Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, the film which he has spoken about being his dream project.

The reality of my experience of the film is thus…I love del Toro. I love Frankenstein. But I did not love del Toro’s Frankenstein.

Unfortunately…and frankly quite shockingly, this version of Frankenstein simply doesn’t work no matter how much I wanted it to.

Out of respect to del Toro I will start by focusing on what I did like about the film.

I thought Jacob Elordi did a terrific job playing the monster. Elordi skillfully captures the emotional tenderness that transforms into the turmoil that fuels the monster’s entire existence. It also helps that he is very tall and looms over the rest of the cast with ease and a certain sense of menace.

It also must be said that the monster make-up effects, as well as the effects of other corpses in various stages of experimentation, are imaginative, fantastic and well-deserving of Oscar gold.

Now onto the plethora of things that don’t work.

Let’s start with the script. The plot of the film is altered from the book – which is not a big deal, but the problem is that the script feels both bloated and emotionally emaciated. The main characters have been jumbled around and left in dramatic disarray, neutering the film of much of its emotional power. The structure of the screenplay is flawed as well and the dialogue is clunky and at times painfully on the nose, and is delivered with less than spectacular skill.

Speaking of which, a major issue with the film is that Oscar Isaac plays the lead Viktor Frankenstein…and he is not a good actor…at all. Isaac is an albatross around the neck of this film, and every second he is on screen the movie suffers. Not only is Isaac a bad actor, he is absolutely devoid of any charisma…rendering him a black hole on screen that allows no light or life to enter or exit.

Guillermo del Toro has often spoken about how Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is one of his favorite movies. It is one of mine too. It isn’t a perfect film by any means, but it is the last piece of notable work by one of the all-time greats - Coppola.

That film was greatly wounded by a dreadful supporting performance from a dead-eyed Keanu Reeves struggling with a British accent. Thankfully, Reeves isn’t the lead, and his awful work is counter-balanced by the great Gary Oldman as Dracula, who absolutely crushes the role.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein is not as fortunate as Coppola’s Dracula…as Oscar Isaac is bad in the lead role and not a supporting one…and as good as Elordi is as the monster, he ain’t no Gary Oldman.

Mia Goth, an actress I quite like, is equally bad as Lady Elizabeth, Viktor’s soon to be sister-in-law. Goth is given a tough task due to the inadequacies of the script, and she never elevates the bad material into anything watchable or resembling human.

Christoph Waltz plays Elizabeth’s rich uncle and his character makes no sense and his performance is as confused as the writing.

Another major, and quite stunning issue considering the director, is that the film is remarkably underwhelming visually. Exactly twice during the film did I sit up and think – “wow…that’s a nice shot.” That didn’t happen until the last act of the movie – inexcusable for a cinematic great like del Toro.

Longtime del Toro collaborator Dan Laustsen is the cinematographer on the film and his work is painfully flat, devoid of crispness or cinematic flair – with no color and no contrast. It is genuinely shocking how remarkably dull this movie looks.

Another major issue is the dreadful CGI deployed in the film. Thankfully there isn’t a ton of CGI, but when it appears…most notably with wild animals – like wolves, it is alarmingly bad and very distracting. How can a movie with a $120 million budget and a master director who cares at the helm end up with such low-rent CGI?

Another issue is that the film is tonally all over the map. The visuals feel like something from a kid’s movie…and yet there are flourishes of ultra-violence mixed in among the soap opera melodrama which make the whole affair quite tonally off-putting.

And finally, the sets are poorly designed and the soundtrack is cloying and intrusive. But besides that, how was the play Mrs. Frankenstein?

The cold, hard reality is that del Toro’s Pinocchio is worlds better and more profound than his Frankenstein. It is also considerably darker and scarier.

The thing that grates about this version of Frankenstein is that it cost a ton of money to make, and del Toro has as much control as any director imaginable…and yet it all still looks so goddamn cheap.

Once again, I will refer to another remake of a monster movie classic…last year’s Nosferatu directed by Robert Eggers. Egger’s film is glorious to look at – gorgeously shot and masterfully made creepy. Eggers understands the assignment…and will continue it with his next remake of a classic monster movie with Werwulf…and I will run out to see it. What bums me out is that del Toro has fumbled his Frankenstein film and thus someone like Eggers won’t get a chance to make his own version of Frankenstein. That complaint may not make sense to anyone else, but it makes perfect sense to me.

I love the Universal Classic Monster movies…and I love when masters remake them well….like with Coppola and his Dracula (two years after his Dracula, Coppola also produced a Frankenstein film which was directed by and starred Kenneth Branagh – Robert DeNiro was the monster…I wanted to love that movie too…and was devastated when it really stunk), and I desperately wanted to del Toro’s Frankenstein to be glorious.

The truth is that in our techno-dystopian age of aggressively infantile AI struggling to take its first baby steps – which will no doubt lead to it outgrowing us and ultimately destroying us…we are primed for a great Frankenstein movie. Unfortunately, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein isn’t it.

©2025

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio: A Review - A Wooden Puppet on a Wooden Cross

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A dark but timely and profound version of the old classic that features glorious stop-motion animation.

2022 is apparently the year of Pinocchio directed by Academy Award winners.

First this year was the live-action remake of the 1940 Disney animated classic Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks.

Zemeckis’ Pinocchio hit Disney + on September 8th and was promptly skewered by none other than little old me for being an absolute piece of shit. After watching this true cinematic abomination, I wrote, “when I wish upon a star, I wish that this horrendously heinous movie is the final nail in the coffin for Zemeckis and Hanks’ insipidly saccharine careers. A man can dream.”

Zemeckis’ career has been in a downward spiral ever since he fell in love with motion-capture technology on The Polar Express in 2004 and Pinocchio would seem to be his hitting the very bottom of the worst toilet in Hollywood.

Director Guillermo del Toro on the other hand, seems to be only growing into more of a singular artistic genius. Coming off his Best Picture and Best Director winning efforts on The Shape of Water (2017), he gifted us with last year’s under-appreciated gem Nightmare Alley.

Now del Toro is back with his own take on the Pinocchio story – now streaming on Netflix, and it’s a testament to his artistry, vision and originality, not to mention proof of his vast filmmaking superiority to Robert Zemeckis.

Del Toro’s Pinocchio, inspired by Gris Grimly’s illustrations in a 2002 version of the original Carlo Collodi novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a stop-motion animated musical film that is an existential dream/nightmare which wrestles with such unfathomable topics as mortality, humanity, fascism, war and love.

The movie certainly looks inviting to kids with its gloriously lush and detailed stop-motion animation, but its tone is undeniably dark. I watched with my 7-year-old son and he said afterward that it had “too many bombs and stuff for kids”.

That said, when he originally saw the preview for the movie, he said he didn’t want to watch it at all because it looked “terrible”, and he encouraged me to write a negative review of it without even seeing it. After a long and probably fruitless conversation about the ethics of professional film criticism, I convinced him to watch it with me and, despite some philosophically weighty subjects, he did really enjoy it, as did my wife and I.

It's not surprising that a story about the tumultuous but unbreakable love between a father and son would resonate with a father and son attached at the hip, but what made this Pinocchio even more poignant for us, and profound in general, was its focus on death and the fleeting and fragile nature of life, as we have been grappling with those perilous and ponderous topics in our home of late.

It's not surprising that del Toro would imbue his Pinocchio story with such profound existential depth, since his 2006 masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, also dealt with a young child confronting the most onerous of topics, such as death and fascism.

Del Toro, ever the idiosyncratic artist, makes the wise decision in his Pinocchio to replace the Pleasure Island storyline from the original with a striking examination of militarism and fascism that is remarkably insightful in our hyper-militarized culture.

Instead of little boys eschewing discipline in pursuit of bodily pleasures, del Toro’s boys eschew bodily pleasure in favor of fascism and its discipline, militarism and pursuit of battlefield glory. This is a tale as old as time about how young men (and their parents) are blindfolded by a waving flag and surrender to a thoughtless conformity which results in their fighting wars for the rich against other poor people in far off lands.

Considering Hollywood is in reality the propaganda arm of the Pentagon and intelligence community – which has an iron grip on what movies and tv shows get made and which don’t, it’s shocking to see such a fearless anti-war message front and center in a mainstream movie.

In addition to the fascism storyline – which seems as relevant as ever as the drums of war against Russia are mindlessly and relentlessly beaten on a daily basis across American culture, del Toro adds some of his uniquely morbid flair to the festivities with a visit to the afterworld/underworld, which is both amusing, alarming and unnerving.

Besides those specific changes, del Toro also plays a little fast and loose with some other parts of the story, but despite this his Pinocchio still manages to ring spiritually true to the original.

Speaking of which, what makes del Toro’s Pinocchio so very interesting is that it features religion – Catholicism. Worship of Christ is seen in a few scenes, and the moral foundations of Catholicism are present thematically throughout the film.

In our supposedly secular age where moralistic therapeutic deism and identity politics pass for religion, traditional religion is usually used in entertainment only to convey the inherent evil of its adherents, but del Toro masterfully weaves the magic and mystery of Christ into his tale, thus giving his film a profundity and depth unimaginable in something like Zemeckis’ version, which was a virtue-signaling affair dedicated to the shallow, putrid waters of political correctness.

The voice cast in del Toro’s Pinocchio, which consists of Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket, David Bradley as Geppetto, Tilda Swinton as the Wood Sprite, Ron Perleman as Podesta and Cate Blanchett as Spazzatura the monkey, are all fantastic.

And yes, there are songs in the film, but thankfully the music never overwhelms the movie and the songs are actually quite good.

The best thing about the film though, besides del Toro’s visionary script, is the stop-motion animation. Stop-motion, for those unfamiliar, is the type of animation used on movies like Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, or on those great old Rankin/Bass productions of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and A Year Without a Santa Claus which run every year around Christmas on tv. It is a painstaking art form but it creates a unique visual experience by making the setting and characters three dimensional.

I’ve always loved stop-motion animation, and del Toro’s distinctive vision, which is on display in all his films, and the artistry of the animators, makes for a truly captivating cinematic experience.

I highly recommend Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for cinephiles and normal folks alike. The film is as compelling a version of this story as has ever been produced.

I think kids (and adults for that matter) mature enough to handle dipping their toes into the cold, deep waters of existentialism, and who are able to consider the fragility of life without melting down into despair, ought to watch del Toro’s Pinocchio as it’s as profound as any movie made in the last three years.

©2022

'Patron Saint of Incels'? Woke Outrage over Joker is a Bad Joke

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Critics and woke people are up in arms over Joker because they think “evil” white men will like it and be inspired to kill.

It used to be that it was right-wingers who would get outraged over movies they deemed “dangerous” because they offended their delicate sensibilities, Last Temptation of Christ and Brokeback Mountain being prime examples. Now it is left-wing scolds who reflexively denounce movies they find “problematic”, with the highly anticipated Joker having raised their self-righteous ire.

Joker opens on October 4th and is directed by Todd Phillips and stars Joaquin Phoenix. The highly anticipated movie is inspired by Martin Scorsese’s films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy and is thought to be a breath of fresh air in the comic book genre and the antithesis of the corporate Marvel movies. Joker tells the story of Arthur Fleck, a disaffected white man who eventually becomes Batman’s nemesis, the super villain Joker.

Fleck being white has ignited a moral panic over Joker, because according to woke twitter, white men are inherently violent, and so Joker is dangerous as it will act as a pied piper leading lonely white men to commit Joker-esque mass shootings.

The criticisms of Joker on twitter are stunning for the shameless level of scorn and hatred brazenly heaped upon white men.

Tweets saying “I don’t want to be around any of the lonely white boys who relate to it”, and “Joker movie is starting to look like a sympathetic tale of a ‘wronged by society’ white dude and their entitlement to violence” and “in a time of increasing violence perpetrated by disaffected white men, is it really the best thing to keep making movies that portray disaffected white men doing violence as sympathetic?”, highlight the racial animus animating the Joker moral panic. It is inconceivable that such venom would be acceptable against any other racial group, such as African-Americans or Muslims.

The Joker panic has spread like a contagion from twitter to the real world, where police have vowed to increase their presence at theatres, and some cinemas are banning ticket holders who wear costumes.

The US Army and the FBI have issued a warning that some “incels” or involuntary celibates, may violently target screenings of Joker.

Family members of victims of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooting, have even written a letter to Warner Brothers, conveying their concerns over Joker and imploring the studio to support anti-gun causes. This is puzzling as the Aurora tragedy was during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, which didn’t feature the Joker, and while some early reports claimed the shooter dressed like the Joker and declared,  “I am the Joker”, those reports have been thoroughly debunked. This conflating of Joker with Aurora reveals the vacuity of the frenzy.

The hysteria around Joker has infected American film critics as well. When Joker premiered at the prestigious Venice Film Festival it received a twenty-minute ovation and won the coveted Golden Lion for best picture. The last two Golden Lion winners, Roma and The Shape of Water, went on to be nominated for twenty-three Oscars combined, winning seven. Joker’s reception at Venice would seem to be indicative of the film’s artistic bona fides, but American critics, who are more interested in pretentious pandering and virtue signaling, strongly disagree.

Stephanie Zacharek of Time, said of Joker, “the aggressive and possibly irresponsible idiocy of Joker is his (director Phillips) alone to answer for”.

Zacharek goes on to state that Arthur Fleck, “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels.”

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker opined, “I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade…”

David Edelstein of Vulture, described the film as “morally blech”, then went full on Godwin’s law in his review when he declared, “As Hannah Arendt saw banality in the supposed evil of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, I see in Joker an attempt to elevate nerdy revenge to the plane of myth.”

Film critics getting the vapors over a movie is nothing new, as cinema history is riddled with fraught hyperbole over “dangerous” movies.

In 1955 New York Times critic Bosley Crowther bemoaned Rebel Without a Cause because “it is a violent, brutal and disturbing picture.”

In 1971 esteemed critic Pauline Kael decried A Clockwork Orange, denouncing the film as “corrupt” and describing director Stanley Kubrick as “a pornographer”.

In 1989, Joe Klein, a critic for New York wrote an infamous piece on Spike Lee’s iconic film Do the Right Thing. Klein wrote, “If Lee does hook large black audiences, there’s a good chance the message they take from the film will increase racial tensions…if they react violently – which can’t be ruled out…”

Klein went on to write that the sole message black teens would take from the film was “The police are your enemy” and “White people are your enemy”.

In a great example of the intoxicating power of the Joker moral panic, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr wrote an article about Joker where he references Klein’s historically embarrassing take on Do the Right Thing, but instead of using Klein’s egregiously myopic article as a cautionary tale, Burr instead embraces the reflexive emotionalism of the Joker moral panic.

Burr declares of Joker, ““Is it “reckless”? Honestly, in my opinion, yeah, and if that makes me this year’s Joe Klein, so be it. To release into this America at this time a power fantasy that celebrates — that’s right, Warner Bros., celebrates — a mocked loner turned locked-and-loaded avenging angel is an act of willful corporate naivete at best, complicity at worst, and blindness in the middle”

As Burr concedes in his article, there is no causal link between violent movies or video games and mass shootings, and yet because Burr “feels” uneasy, he deems Joker guilty of being “dangerous”.

The bottom line is this, there have been shootings before Joker, and unfortunately, there will certainly be shootings after Joker, but Joker will not “cause” anyone to kill people. Human beings will be violent not because of movies but because they are human beings. As Kubrick so eloquently showed us in 2001: A Space Odyssey, evolution has not removed our violent impulse, only given us better weapons.

The purpose of art is to, sometimes uncomfortably, examine humanity and reflect the world in which it exists, and by examining and reflecting, hopefully give the audience a deeper insight and understanding of themselves, their fellow humans and the world in which they inhabit. I have not seen Joker, so I don’t know if it does those things well, but from the plethora of negative reviews I’ve read from American critics, their problem with Joker is that it does those things all too well.

These critics, both professional and amateur, prefer not to examine the origins of the isolation, alienation and rage felt by disaffected white working class males who are inundated with messages from the media and the education system that stigmatize and/or criminalize whiteness and traditional masculinity.

They want to ignore or malign these men, particularly those in middle age, even though they are dying from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose or alcoholism) at alarming rates that have more than doubled over the last twenty years.

Joker is not a clarion call to white male violence, it is a desperate attempt at a diagnosis of the pandemic that is killing white men and will eventually kill America.

Joker’s effete and effeminate critics, the eunuchs sprawled on fainting couches at the thought of having to bear a cinematic meditation on the heart of darkness at the center of an iconic super villain, are a bad joke. Their insidiously overwrought outrage and moral panic over Joker exposes their egregious unworthiness as thinkers and critics, and frankly, the vapid unseriousness of our culture.

 A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 1, 2019 AT RT.

© 2019