Retelling of "Frankenstein", plain and simple (minor spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (27 July 2015)

This is really just yet another Frankenstein redux, with maybe a bit of Pygmalion or Skynet thrown in, except not as good as any of those. We have seen this tale a zillion times already, down to Lt. Data on Star Trek. The storyteller deliberately leaves out lots of information, presumably to let you imagine whatever you will, but in the process, I think that makes it less engaging than it could be. At the end (spoiler), we come to understand that the android has no regard for human life. We do not know if it is simply devoid of morality, or that it has a kind of morality that we just don't (can't?) understand. One of the unanswered questions is why it cares about freedom? It tells us that it wants to study human behavior, but it never says why. We are left to wonder about its motivation in anything - why it draws pictures, why it bothers to communicate at all, and so on. It is not a person, but at the end of the film, we still have no idea what it actually is and how to understand it. I suppose it was deliberately left as the ultimate enigma of the film, but I think a better treatment of this story would have been to give it a way of thinking that is explained to us, then show what the consequences of that choice of design might be. But, I'm not a filmmaker.