Rather than shocking new life into a familiar legend, respectable horror nerd Guillermo del Toro pores over Mary Shelley’s seminal science fiction masterpiece with the studious attention of a literature professor. He follows Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 example (not to mention that of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula adaptation of a couple of years earlier) in prioritising fidelity to the source material, although he takes enough liberties to keep it interesting.
Alexandre Desplat
2 posts
As the schemer-in-chief, Benicio del Toro’s stone face is a perfect vehicle for Anderson’s deadpan style of humour, and his capacity to straddle even the thickest borders between good and evil, nasty and nice, callous and ingenuous, allows him to play with the darker tone of his director’s latest verbose, and unusually action-packed, screenplay.