Branagh both directed the movie and played Victor Frankenstein, and it quickly becomes clear that he was equipped to handle about half of one of those tasks. His Frankenstein is the least subtle man on the planet, constantly voicing his intentions aloud, which is not helpful when your intentions are to dig up bodies and electrocute them in an experiment that you just now made up. Every moment, no matter how small, is accompanied by a score that sounds like someone threw an entire brass section at your head. And Robert De Niro plays the monster, which is a casting choice that you'd think that someone would've caught when they were proofreading the shooting schedule.

TriStar Pictures Eventually, someone will catch it.

The movie was meant to be the most faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel ever, and in its quest to get Frankenstein BINGO, it gets nearly everything wrong. However, it does get one thing remarkably correct: It understands that, while the father/son relationship between Frankenstein and his creature is important, what's also important is the dick-waving contest that it devolves into.

See, most Frankenstein adaptations never quite get to the part where the monster and the scientist start cock-blocking each other at every opportunity. The most famous version of Frankenstein, the one made in 1931, is an hour long and is like a Greatest Hits collection of the book. And Bride Of Frankenstein only features the bride for about five minutes before the monster get angsty and decides to literally blow up every living cast member.

Universal Pictures "We were doing pretty good, but then I got sad. So I guess it's goodbye, everyone with a speaking part."

But Branagh, benefited by a decent budget and the impulse to turn every scene in the novel into an orchestral time bomb, includes the bits of the book that are the equivalent of the monster smacking Frankenstein in the nuts and running away laughing. Hell, at one point he even has Frankenstein revive his dead wife for dancing purposes, only for the creature to rip her away to forcefully grind with her.

TriStar Pictures It's never Ladies' Night at Club Frankenstein.

That part isn't in the book, but it's a nice distillation of how there are many previously untapped portions of the story that basically feature the monster and his crazy dad bumping shoulders and screaming "YOU WANT SOME, BRO? BECAUSE WE CAN DO THIS SHIT. RIGHT. NOOOOW." at each other.

Moreau was played by Marlon Brando, who was far beyond what could be considered the "twilight" of his career at this point. A "twilight" signifies some kind of slowing down or fading away, but Brando had lived past that and had gone supernova. His acting is everywhere and nowhere. His performance is both the best thing about the film and a black hole from which the rest of the movie is desperately trying to flee. He is both the unstoppable force and the immovable object.

New Line Cinema "Ha ha! And I definitely wore this on purpose! Certainly not because I just woke up from a four-day nap."

And he's the best Moreau we've ever seen.

See, most Moreau adaptations are forced to grapple with the fact that Moreau isn't a great villain. He's a mean, lunatic scientist whom the plot revolves around, but he has no grand scheme other than to keep trying to create his animal people. Also, his death isn't even the climax of the book. As soon as he eats it, there's a whole act left. Most movies turn Moreau into the antagonist who must be conquered in a blaze of horror and glory. Brando's Moreau is devoured in the middle of the movie while he lies screaming in a hammock.

New Line Cinema Shine on, you inconveniently eccentric diamond.

Brando's Moreau is a terrible person, but he's less concerned with, well, anything going on around him, and more concerned with being a god to his furry playthings. The closest he comes to being the actual bad guy is when he repeatedly involves the protagonist in awkward conversations. We often lump Moreau in with guys like Dracula and the Invisible Man, but in reality, he's that dude at the bar who won't shut the fuck up about his new pets. Brando's Moreau might be inexplicable, but it's the only thing in the movie that feels like a natural retelling of the book.

And you'd think that any I Am Legend made before the '70s would be similarly nice'd up in the traditional Hollywood way. The chilling vibe at the end of the novella would be replaced by classically good-looking people making out in front of the Statue of Liberty or something, because all is right in the world, there are no more vampires, and their son will grow up to be a Roosevelt.

But that isn't so in The Last Man On Earth, which features Vincent Price looming around and stabbing things. The movie is painfully slow, and was destined to be in the public domain from the first frame. But what's surprising is that Price's vampire hunter never gets the chance to do anything remotely heroic. Yeah, he's the last "man" on Earth, but this version tells the story of what would happen if the world's only living guy was a violent dickhead.

Public DomainHere lies Dr. Robert Morgan. He was disliked by literally everyone on Earth.

The book ends with the protagonist killing himself before he can be executed by survivors, never getting any kind of redemption because he's, well, kind of a serial killer. It's a pretty dark note, and The Last Man On Earth ends on an even darker one when, impaled on a spear, Price screams that his pursuers are all freaks and that HE'S the last man. Not you infected assholes. He is, because, well, he just is. He murdered a lot of your loved ones because he mistakenly thought they were harmful, and YOU'RE the shitheels for chasing him over it.

So think about that the next time you try to protect your loved ones and build a safe community, you fucking jerks.

Luhrmann had previously made Romeo + Juliet, and his vivid, sweeping treatment goes hand in hand with the emotional broad strokes required to tell the story of undying love between dumb middle-schoolers. Here, this preference for style over substance fits incredibly well too, but in the most morbid way possible. See, while the actors are trapped on a bored trip to a tragic destiny, Luhrmann is busy making the Roaring Twenties look fucking incredible. This makes all of the death stuff in the end way sadder, because they were forced to leave the '20s, where everyone drinks and dances all the time and sadness is prohibited.

Warner Bros. Pictures This, of course, would all end with the Great Frown Plague of 1929.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's original novel also builds up a tale that will inevitably end in depressing confusion, but in a way that does service to the characters. Luhrmann captures that too, despite the characters. And he does it with a blaring rendition of the setting of the book. If you can't garner a script that will emotionally affect people, at least you can pump pop music over trendy early-20th-century galas and hope that the audience is as sad about leaving the party as the narrator is.

Honestly, Watchmen is probably the best movie on this list. However, it's not a great adaptation. Every moral grey area in a book that's almost totally comprised of moral grey areas has been splashed with a coat of "But how can we make it rad?" The book is about the death of the age of superheroes, and the movie really tries to be about that. However, everything the heroes do, from the extended hallway fight in the prison to Rorshach's entire contribution to the plot, is so goddamn awesome that heroes kind of seem like the right thing to go with. Even when the movie tries to haphazardly reapply the subtlety in the end, you're on Team Heroes. Those guys do dropkicks, and the grey areas feel like three karate chops wearing a nuance-colored trench coat.

The only character who seems to have been properly transported from the comics is Doctor Manhattan, the guy most famous for the fact that 185 million dollars' worth of audience members went to the fun superhero movie and received multiple blue dongs instead. In the comics, Doctor Manhattan is both awe-inspiring and infuriating. He's a man of limitless power but a total inability to connect to mankind. He's pragmatic to a fault. He's like that guy who prides himself on always "Tellin' it like it is," if that guy could explode people with a thought and, well, walked around with his bright azure wiener out.

In the movie, Doctor Manhattan gets the closest thing to a full character arc, mainly because the film takes the time to show how a smart, caring guy turned into a tired god. And you never once feel like Zack Snyder is trying to movie-fy him. There are no scenes wherein Manhattan has to deal with a room full of surprise ninjas. None of his action sequences from the comic get extra bad guys thrown into them, despite how much it would help to meet the Radness Quota. He's a tranquil special effects extravaganza. A cosmic blockbuster sigh.

DC Comics "Oh, nothin'. Just bein' omnipotent. You?"

Somehow, the only character Batman v. Supermn director Zack Snyder perfected was the quietest one.

Daniel has a blog and a Twitter.

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