• MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN

With Kenneth Branagh, Robert De Niro, Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Hulce, Aidan Quinn, Ian Holm, Richard Briers, and John Cleese.

With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito, Emma Thompson, Frank Langella, Pamela Reed, and Judy Collins.

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It’s sad that media critics see fidelity to Anne Rice’s novel in a movie adaptation as a more pressing issue than fidelity to Mary Shelley’s novel, though perhaps it’s not surprising given that a faithful adaptation of Shelley’s novel, with its extended philosophical and political reflections, would be commercially unthinkable. Yet even if one concentrates only on the spirit of the novel, one can argue that the Branagh film, with its labored script by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont, only compounds the many distortions found in most other adaptations.

To understand the original it helps to bear in mind a few facts about Mary Shelley, born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in England in 1797. Her mother died shortly after giving birth to her, following a severe hemorrhage. In 1814 Mary ran off to the continent with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and in 1815 bore a daughter who soon died. In 1816, she married Shelley, bore a son, William, who lived, and started writing her first novel, Frankenstein, which she completed before she was 20 and published anonymously before she was 21. All these experiences are in the novel.

In short, Mary Shelley allowed the monster to carry out an equitable revenge, but the screenwriters make him simply throw a tantrum. Furthermore they turn both character’s prospective mates into one single, all-purpose beanbag, who conveniently and graciously commits suicide, clearing the field for those mud-wrestling jocks.

Reed’s pregnancy is carefully kept in sync with Schwarzenegger’s to stave off potential audience objections, and by the end of the movie, Thompson is allowed to become pregnant as well. But one might argue that in this story a woman’s becoming pregnant is only proof that she’s an honorary guy.