Timur Bekmambetov to examine THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN?

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

Having seen the frantic 'Wanted' and spent time with the Russian 'Day Watch' trilogy, I would have never pegged director Timur Bekmambetov to hold much interest in re-telling the 'Frankenstein'tale. Although it's still early days in his career, Bekmambetov seems to be a guy primed for the fast-paced, overly loud and ambitious blockbuster films and a guy who will spend the majority of his peak years adapting comic book material. There's as yet, nothing in his filmography that would suggest he could translate the deeper themes of Mary Shelley's much celebrated and multi layered novel. It's been reported that Bekmambetov, who has struggled to get 'Wanted 2' off the ground in the absence of Angelina Jolie, is now attached to direct 'The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein', an adaptation of Peter Ackroyd's 2008 novel which is setup at WME Entertainment... Tony-Award winning playwright of 'Proof" (later turned into a 2005 movie) and'The Lake House' screenwriter David Auburn, originally pitched a screen adaptation to WME, who quickly attached Bekmambetov and the complete package is out to the big studio's according to Production Weekly. However we should note that Bekmambetov's attachment has yet to be confirmed by his people. The book is the mix of a prequel/re-imagining of Shelley's novel, spending a bit of extended time on Victor's period at Oxford where he meets a poet (by the name of Shelley) whose religious and philisophical disagreement sparks the idea for Frankenstein to experiment with re-animating the dead from the corpses of convicts. The novel is a period piece, and features post-modern supporting characters like 'Frankenstein' author Mary Shelley and even Lord Byron. From reading a few reviews online, the novel is about 70% re-tread, and 30% new stuff from Ackroyd. The last few lines of Terrence Raferty's New York Times review stands for what most people have said on the book;

Peter Ackroyd, for all his extraordinary literary skill, doesn€™t quite reinvent €œFranken­stein€ either. €œThe Casebook of Victor Frankenstein€ is an entertaining and bracingly intelligent yarn, but, try as he will, Ackroyd is hard pressed to spark an idea that isn€™t already burning, fiercely, in Mary Shelley€™s still-vital novel. ]This, perhaps, is the postmodern Prometheus: an attempt, aware of its own futility, to reanimate something that never died.

IMDB list 100 credits since it's debut in 1931, and this is only one of about five big attempts to bring 'Frankenstein' to the screen.