For Oscar Isaac and, to a lesser and diminishing extent, "written for the screen by"/director Guillermo del Toro. I watched the first twenty minutes or so a while back and put off the rest until now as it is lengthy and did not seem very promising, especially after his previous remakes (Nightmare Alley (2021), Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)).
Isaac finds himself excommunicated from the Victorian high science scene in London due to his ungodly "galvanic" experiments on cadavers of dubious provenance. In the audience (but not with us) is a miscast Cristoph Waltz who has more money than the godly due to supplying arms to some unnamed war on the continent. With those funds and a suitably spooky castle somewhere the modern Promethean tale unspools as it always has, without humour, terminating in some unearnt redemption as monster/Australian Jacob Elordi strides off into the sunset after a requited but unconsummated something-or-other with Mia Goth.
Visually it's mostly gloaming in the magic hour with some hydrophilic stuff recycled from The Shape of Water (2017). The CGI is not particularly good. It's graphic but not violent until it's graphic and violent. Aurally the soundtrack is mostly obtrusive heavy portentous music.
Often I felt like I'd seen most of it before. Elordi often seemed to be the second coming of Clancy Brown though the indestructibility/rapid healing and constructed-superhuman was perhaps more Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. (Can Elordi sing and dance?) There's also a dash of vintage Star Trek, of an adult human-alike learning what the kids already know, autonemesis. Motivation was generally lacking. I doubt this was on many best-of-2025 lists. All of which is to say that the story has been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that there's little point serving it up straight now.
Peter Sobczynski. Dana Stevens spends a lot of words not talking about the movie. "[S]eems designed to be a moody steampunk melodrama." Lots of dazzling practical effects. Marya E. Gates: poor. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Guillermo del Toro and talked up Mia Goth. He liked her earlier stuff but she didn't have much to work with here.
