Modern Prometheus?

 

Guillermo del Toro learned to tell stories by watching Mexican telenovelas. Before that sounds like an insult, let’s be clear: the telenovelas of the 70s and ’80s were perfect emotion machines, dramatic structures so finely calibrated they crossed borders without needing subtitles. Del Toro absorbed that DNA: unapologetic melodrama, tragedy as everyday currency, characters who bled on screen. And he transformed it into something uniquely his own when he made Pan’s Labyrinth. He took the essence of Cuna de Lobos and fused it with European Gothic horror. The result was cinema that never apologized for feeling.

His true laboratory was La Hora Marcada, that cursed 1989 series no one watched, and yet everyone who saw it never forgot. There, amid ridiculous budgets and thirty minute episodes, Del Toro discovered that monsters work best when they tell stories about real people. That lesson carried him to Cronos, then to the controlled disaster of Mimic (where studios stripped him of creative control), and finally to Hellboy, his first major triumph after the stumble of Blade II. Then came Pacific Rim, a misstep disguised as giant robots. But even his failures had more personality than most of what Hollywood produces in a decade.

The problem with Frankenstein isn’t that it’s bad. The problem is that it’s safe. Del Toro has unlimited access to Netflix’s money, he can build Victorian sets that would make any other director weep with envy, he can hire the best actors available. And what does he use all of it to make? …What exactly? A beautiful adaptation. Correct. Elegant. Dead. A hybrid of Willy Wonka’s paternal traumas and the misunderstood monster who steals girls’ hearts, à la Edward Scissorhands, both by Tim Burton.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 as a radical text: a twenty year old woman imagining a world where men play God, and fail spectacularly, where creation rebels against its creator because no one ever taught it how to be human. It was feminist science fiction before the term existed. It was a treatise on absent parenthood, on toxic masculinity disguised as scientific genius, on what it means to be a monster when society denies you humanity.

Del Toro held in his hands the chance to update all of that: artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, Silicon Valley’s arrogance in creating things without considering consequences. And yet he chose to make a flawless period piece that says nothing new.

Meanwhile, Robert Eggers took Nosferatu and turned it into a study of sexual repression and patriarchal power. Ryan Coogler used Sinners to speak of racial oppression through vampirism. These directors understand that monster cinema only matters when the monsters represent something real, something painful, something we recognize in the mirror.

Del Toro knew this. He proved it in The Devil’s Backbone, where ghosts were the Spanish Civil War. He proved it in Pan’s Labyrinth, where the true monster was fascism. What happened?

The uncomfortable answer: too many resources. Del Toro was always better when he had to invent, when budgetary constraints forced him to be ingenious. Cronos cost almost nothing, and remains his most personal film. The Devil’s Backbone was made on crumbs, and it’s perfect. Now he has infinite money, and he uses it to build spectacular sets where nothing of consequence happens.

His Frankenstein is beautiful as a Victorian postcard, and just as empty. It tries to encompass every theme of the original novel within two hours, and ends up not deepening into any of them. The Creature is technically astonishing, but never feels human. Victor Frankenstein is pathetic, but not tragic. The film wants to move us, and only succeeds in decorating.

The saddest part? Del Toro remains a master of visual storytelling. Every frame of Frankenstein could hang in a museum. But cinema isn’t just aesthetics. It’s narrative. It’s emotion. It’s risk. It’s saying something that unsettles, provokes, lingers after the credits roll. Del Toro once knew how to do that. Now he makes films Netflix can market as “events”, but no one will remember in five years.

The monster he created this time isn’t Shelley’s Creature. It’s his own ambition without direction: unlimited access to resources without a story strong enough to sustain them. And unlike Shelley’s monster, this one doesn’t even have the decency to rebel.