I, Frankenstein is present-day action-horror twist on the classic tale. Writer/director Stuart Beattie was here at Comic-Con 2013, graphic novel creator Kevin Grevioux (who also appears onscreen), Yvonne Strahovski and Aaron Eckhart appeared to talk us through it.
"This is a Frankenstein who's been walking the Earth for 200 years and is seemingly immortal. He gets caught up in a supernatural war between demons and gargoyles; the demons want to discover the secret of Frankenstein's eternal life, and so he's caught between the two and the fate of mankind rests on him."
Eckhart says his levels of badassdom here go "all the way up to 11" and says that the movie's stick-fighting should work in 3D.
The footage we saw was heavy on the CG, but the design was interesting; heavily Gothic and only a little reminiscent of the Underworld series, to which it's been compared (Grevioux also created that world). There are airborne battles between angelic-looking creatures and horrendous demons, as well as Eckhart's Frankenstein brandishing huge blades that look like nothing so much as bat'leths.
"I was trying to find a new language for action, so my mantra was no fist-fights, no shoot-outs, no car chases in this film," said Beattie.
Grevioux said, "After Underworld, I was trying to find a way to bring another monster to life in a modern context, and I wrote a screenplay and based on that I wrote the graphic novel trying to find a way to make Frankenstein an action hero - and I think we did that."
"I'm a scientist, an electrophysiologist to be exact," says Strahovski. "My character doesn't believe in all this, but she gets thrown into this world that you saw onscreen. There's a discovery of one another in the movie. At first, she describes Adam as "it" and describes him very scientifically. But one of the things in the movie is what it means to be human; originally he was stitched together from eight corpses. Tara's definitely not a damsel in distress here; although I don't get to kick butt in a CIA type of way, but I do get to kick butt in a science way."
"It's very much still Mary Shelley's character, but in a new way, a new light and a modern-day setting," says Beattie. As for the look of the character, "There's only so much you can do to make Aaron Eckhart ugly. And there's been 200 years for those scars to heal, so those scars would have faded but they're still there."
I, Frankenstein comes out next year. Look out for sexy monsters around then.