There’s no harm in trying to piggyback on an instant classic, but the suspicious skeptics were out in force when it was first revealed that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was in the works and on its way to theaters a mere two years after Francis Ford Coppola had delivered Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Coppola even produced the latter, which saw Kenneth Branagh pull double duty as star and director, but the results were barely comparable. Whereas Gary Oldman’s alarmingly sexy take on the iconic vampire pulled in big bucks at the box office, won widespread praise from critics and audiences, before going on to win three Academy Awards, Robert De Niro’s turn as the legendary monster wasn’t quite as well-received.
It wasn’t a flop by any means after earning $112 million on a $45 million budget, but the reactions were substantially more tepid, even if it did secure a solitary (and well-deserved) Oscar nod of its own for Best Makeup. In terms of production value and atmosphere, 1994’s Frankenstein is top-notch, but it always feels as though something is missing to elevate it into the upper tier of adaptations.
The ridiculously hammy performances from Branagh and De Niro certainly don’t help, but an entirely fitting autopsy is currently underway on Reddit as as users pull the Gothic fantasy apart and put it back together again in an attempt to determine something even remotely resembling a consensus.
Inevitably, the recurring theme is that it’s a solid-if-unspectacular reimagining that can’t hold a candle to its spiritual predecessor, which is something all but the most vocal defenders of the good doctor’s experiments can agree with.