Essay, Research Paper: Frankenstein Novel/Video Assignment

FRANKENSTEIN

Frankenstein is a book about how mans' attempt to become perfect/create perfection. In a religious perspective this is what will happen if you try to create life without GOD but in my perspective this is what will happen when you try to understand the unknown with an uneducated mind. This is the most important theme, in my opinion, that is shown with great detail throughout the novel and is also shown in the movie even though it is not so deep and has an impact on us.

The movie had added a few parts and pretty much skipped a whole theme that is not of great importance but still would have given us a little bit of insight into relationship between Justine and her mother and why she always treated Justine below everybody else.

The theme that the movie missed out was how Justine was her fathers' favorite and after her father left them her mother had despised all that was close to him including her daughter, Justine. She had many occasions tried to make peace with Justine but it all ended with her blaming her daughter for the leaving her husband and the death of her brothers' and sisters'.

Now I will get back to my first topic, that of becoming perfect. We as people are always trying to make ourselves better in hopes of making perfection for our children but the closer we get to that future the farther away we actually get from being real to ourselves and being able to know what we want. We are trying to be perfectionists when we are all bound to make mistakes and we cannot help the way we are. Mary Shelley does a good job of showing this in the novel when we see Victor Frankenstein in London studying medicine and then he becomes obsessed with making a person using outside stimuli instead of a women and a man he is trying to make the most perfect person and he looses track of the person that thinks he is perfect, Elizabeth. The movie also does a good job at showing the exact same thing except he seems more obsessive in the novel.

I believe the movie did an excellent job at showing the obssessiveness of Victor towards his science experiment considering it had to make it run only about 20 minutes on that topic..

The book also has some important facts that the movie misses out on such as when Victor lands on the banks of Ireland and is accused of murdering his best friend whom he had not had contact with in a while, Clerval. In the movie there never was a part of Ireland, and traveling, Clerval never had an opportunity to be away from Victor and be subjected to the monster. This is also when he gets sick for a second time but this time he can't be taken care of by Clerval. The most important part of this is when he sees Clerval dead and sees the marks of strangulation around his neck reminds him of when he hears about Williams' death and also the hanging of Justine.




The ending too was dramatically different in the movie from the book. In the novel the monster jumps out of the boat onto a raft type of thing and goes away to never be heard from again. In the movie the monster takes Victor with him and cremating him along with himself.

All in all the movie had done a fairly good job with the movie considering that they had to appeal to such a variety of people. They cut out many parts of the book and also because if they had put everything in the movie it would have been very long.