The film starts off with Captain Robert Walton (Aidan Quinn, Legends of the Fall) attempting to make his mark on history by taking his ship and crew to the North Pole. As the icy days and months drag on, the crew eventually gets frozen in place and have to consider turning back, even if their captain doesn't want to. Just as talk of mutiny starts to grow, a man comes out of the snowy-white, ranting about a monster. This man is Victor Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, who also directed the film) and he has a tale to tell the Captain Walton.
Frankenstein was born into a rich family. His father is a renowned doctor, he has a lovely adopted sister, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter, Sweeney Todd and just about everything Tim Burton has done lately), who was brought into the Frankenstein house after her parent's were killed by the Scarlet Fever, and he has a much younger brother, whose birth resulted in his mother's death. Since Frankenstein's mother's passing, he has been obsessed with learning about medicine, biology and physics and is determined to find a way for man to live forever. When he goes off to learn medicine at a university and meets a fringe theorist who has all but been ousted by the medical community, Professor Waldman (John Cleese), his obsession grows even more since Waldman's works have gotten him really close to bringing the dead back to life. Frankenstein also meets Henry Clerval (Tom Hulce, Amadeus), a fellow medical student who sticks by his campion through thick and thin (and it gets mighty thick before the end).
When a crazed pauper (Robert de Niro) kills Waldman while trying to give him a Small Pox vaccine, Frankenstein looks into his mentor's books and builds upon the research the man started. Using bodies dug up from a local cemetary of murderers and rapists, he rebuilds a lifeless body and uses the brain of his teacher to control his creation. During this time, his connection with the outside world, as well as his family (and love ... apparently it isn't all that weird for a boy to fall in love with his adoptive-sister at that time) gets thin and Elizabeth starts to worry that he might have found a new woman. Elizabeth shows up at Frankentstein's apartment just as he finishes creating his creature and determines it a failure as its apparent lifeless body hangs from the ceiling.
Feeling like a failure, Frankenstein, Elizabeth and Frankenstein's new partner, Clerval, head back to Geneva to live a life where Victor never played God. Little does he know though, that not only is The Creature (played wonderfully by Robert De Niro) still Alive!!! (sorry had to do it), but he isn't the brain-dead oaf that he is typically portrayed as in modern pop-culture. Out in the wild, The Creature has numerous encounters with humans who fear his patchwork body and huge size. It isn't until he takes refuge in a shack near a family patriarched by an old blind man that he has time to learn how to talk and read, and it is with these remembered abilities that he learns he was created by Victor Frankenstein and starts a long, cold walk to Geneva.
I don't want to get into what happens when The Creature and Frankentstein are once again reunited, the last 30 to 40 minutes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are pretty fast-paced (actually, there aren't that many slow parts to the whole film) and have a few nice twists to them. Of course, anyone who has read the original novel or knows the story so well that they might as well have read it will know how it all plays out, but for newcomers to the actual story, it's much better, in my opionon, than the Boris Karloff, fire-wielding peasants version.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be purchased either by itself or in a three-pack with Wolf and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Like the other two films, Frankenstein has no special features on the disc itself. It does have BD Live access, so you will be able to watch whatever additional features happen to be hosted there whenever you actually go to view it. I would typically say that a movie without special features isn't really worth a purchase, maybe a rental at most. In this case, De Niro and Branagh's portrayal of these characters is pretty solid and do the novel justice (at least as much justice as Hollywood can give). Because of that, Frankenstein might be the only film of this three-pack that is worth individual purchase, but if you are a fan of the classic Jack Nicholson movie, or the film-adaptation of the classic Dracula story as well, then you can't really go wrong with the boxed set, especially if you like watching movies of this sort every Halloween.
