Guillermo del Toro's lavish "Frankenstein" adaptation starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi delivers stunning visuals but struggles to emotionally connect in this Netflix release.

Guillermo del Toro Hopes He's Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream The director tells WIRED the real Victor Frankensteins are tyrannical politicians and Silicon Valley tech bros. Guillermo del Toro attends the Headline Gala screening of Netflix's during the 69th BFI London Film Festival. Guillermo del Toro loves a challenge. Nothing the 61-year-old director does could be termed "half-assed," and each of his movies is planned, scripted, and storyboarded with immense attention to detail. Such discipline is evident in, his adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. It's a movie del Toro has been trying to make for years, and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes--as well as some embellishing of Shelley's story--could only be the work of someone as connected as he is with his source material.

In Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein," a Vast Vision Gets Netflixed Down to Size The latest reanimation of Mary Shelley's classic tale, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is a labyrinthine tour of a filmmaker's career-long obsessions. Earlier this year, Quentin Tarantino, when asked to parse the high points of his filmography in an interview, described the two-part "Kill Bill" (2003-04) as "the movie I was born to make." He added, "I think'Inglourious Basterds' is my masterpiece, but'Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood' is my favorite." Might these be distinctions without a difference? I'm generally wary of artistic-birthright narratives, not least because a filmmaker of remarkable talent, consistent vision, and good fortune might well wind up with multiple candidates for the honor.

Since the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, there have been hundreds of films, TV series and comic books featuring some iteration of the famous character. The latest adaptation sees Inside Llewyn Davis star Oscar Isaac take on the role of Victor Frankenstein, with Saltburn and Euphoria actor Jacob Elordi unrecognisable as the monster-like creature he gives life to. Isaac recalls: "Guillermo said, 'I'm creating this banquet for you, you just have to show up and eat'. And that was the truth, there was a fusion, I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well. "I can't believe I'm here right now," he adds, "that we got to this place from two years ago.

At the core of most tales about androids and artificial intelligence lies a variation of the same question: what, if anything, makes these sentient, inorganic beings different from us? Flesh and biology aside, do they possess all that makes us human--are they, in all their hardware and programming, fundamentally the same? Steven Spielberg's criminally underrated film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is less concerned with this question than it is with questioning what obligation humans have for their "living" creations. It centers around a mecha (mechanical humanoid robot) named David (Haley Joel Osment) who is uniquely programmed with the ability to love. Stanley Kubrick, who originally conceived of the film and purchased the rights to its source material by Brian Aldiss, saw it as a Pinocchio story. Like Pinocchio, David is a manufactured object that suddenly dreams of becoming human.

The same goes for Uprising's talk of the strange scientific properties of kaiju blood and the importance of banding together at the end of the world, which can feel like a strong case for un-canceling the apocalypse. Sequels are never going to be truly original--canonical consistency is the entire point--but any subsequent installments in a franchise should at least try to further the lore, and I'm fairly certain the only new thing I learned in Uprising was that tapping into kaiju brains can get you so high you'll want to marry a kaiju brain.

Science-fiction film costume designers create sartorial future worlds and, if they get it right, can influence current trends along the way. Here, we ask a few forward-looking costume designers to describe their favorite piece from each of their current films and, interestingly, the choices were anything but outrageously fantastical -- they ranged from the lovely and nostalgic to the manly and the fussy. Luis Sequeira's favorite costume is Elisa's (Sally Hawkins) enchanting dream-sequence dress. Set against the film's lush, dark, moody world of the early '60s, the black-and-white dream sequence "is pure light and love," says Sequeira. "It was amazing to create something so opposite to the rest of the film."

"The Shape of Water" is a wonder to behold. Magical, thrilling and romantic to the core, a sensual and fantastical fairy tale with moral overtones, it's a film that plays by all the rules and none of them, going its own way with fierce abandon. More than that, "Shape of Water" is both grounded in the fertile soil of genre filmmaking and elevated to unexpected heights by the transcendent imagination of director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro works well in many genres, from horror to science fiction to gothic melodrama, but as 2006's brilliant "Pan's Labyrinth" made clear, his facility as modern cinema's most accomplished fantasy filmmaker trumps everything else. "Shape of Water," which took home the Golden Lion at Venice, is more than that film's equal, it echoes its legendary predecessor, Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," in its ability to simultaneously call forth a spectacular imaginary world and make it heartbreakingly believable.

The latest movie by Guillermo del Toro is the genre-hopping "The Shape of Water," which manages all at once to be a romance, an espionage thriller, a period story, a monster movie and even make time for a full-fledged musical number. His previous feature, "Crimson Peak," was a gothic romance and horror tale. A trilogy of novels he co-wrote became the basis for the television series "The Strain." The "Trollhunters" book he co-wrote became an animated series. And Del Toro often expresses an ongoing interest in video games.

It's got those giant robot mechs--aka "jaegers"--and even a few crazy-ass kaiju. Star Wars: The Force Awakens star John Boyega toplines this time around, and Rinko Kikuchi and Charlie Day have returned to reprise their roles. Gone, though, are the original's director Guillermo del Toro (he's listed as a producer and story writer), stars Idris Elba and Charlie Hunnam, and screenwriter Travis Beacham. In Pacific Rim terms: the movie might have a new pilot, but the mech's got the same wiring. However, Uprising, which takes place 10 years after the events of the first Pacific Rim, has a strange legacy to uphold.