20 Best Science Fiction Movies Released Since 2000

Of all the science fiction and horror properties that have been done to death, Frankenstein is up there, second only to Dracula. But somehow, last year, Guillermo del Toro gave us an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel for the ages, with all the bells, whistles, gothic imagery and flair the director has made his career on.

Oscar Isaac is Baron Victor Frankenstein, a surgeon and scientist operating outside of society’s norms and on the verge of a major breakthrough – reanimation. Funded by the uncle of his brother’s fiancée, Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), Frankenstein absconds to a Wallace Monument style tower to conduct his experiments on the recently deceased, and creates himself a hideous, lumbering, stitched-together monster in the process (Jacob Elordi).

So far, so familiar. But the film turns on its latter third – the creature’s story. While Isaac’s Frankenstein is a scenery-chewing deranged genius, Elordi’s monster is intelligent, sensitive, and capable of so much more than his creator ever assumed, despite being reviled and rebuked by society at every turn. The sets are lush, the cinematography rich, the characters are suitably ugly, and this, above all other Frankenstein films, best portrays Shelley’s central theme, by asking which of us are the real monsters?