Frankenstein Movie vs. Book Essay Example

Altough I have not seen all of Robert Deniro’s full version of Frankenstein I could easily tell from the couple clips we watched it looks quite different. I am a film major and I know what decisions are probably involved in changing some of the scenes for visual effects. Sometimes things on a page will not read as well when they are presented on screen. In this short paper I will concentrate on why they may have changed certain details for the screen.
First of all, the laboratory scene. In the book we never really see or hear of a lab like the one in the movie. Although this is not how Mary Shelly wants us to think of the creation of Frankenstein it is very visually moving. With respect to whether the movie improved on this scene I would say yes. I know it is a bold statement but the visuals of the lab and Frankenstein being created is very entertaining. I think that if they tried to do it exactly like Mary Shelly did in the book it wouldn’t have been as visually stimulating.
As we talked about in class the innuendoes of the monster’s birth were all there. The big sack that acted as a womb of sorts, and who can forget the electric eels (sperm). All of these images added to the final climax of the monster emerging alive! I was intrigued by the birth of the monster in this movie. However when I think about the last scene I am not that impressed by how they ended the movie. The way they choose to end it does not sit as well as Shelly’s ending. Shelly’s ending made sense to me and to everyone who read the book. Also the movies ending made the beast seem like a complete monster. This is not true in the book, at the end we see that the monster is not completely evil. He sits over Victor’s dead body and weeps. There is compassion in him. The book ending was so much better then the movie ending. I now can see why the movie ended the way it did. In Hollywood they need a more concrete ending. They hate to leave things open-ended as the book does. They ended it