“Frankenstein” (2025)

It may seem strange to include Frankenstein in a series about artificial intelligence. Mary Shelley's story predates computers by two centuries, and Guillermo del Toro's 2025 film is not about artificial intelligence at all. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like one of the most important stories to put into this conversation. Frankenstein is ultimately about humanity's desire to create life, to understand consciousness, and perhaps most dangerously, to take upon ourselves a role that belongs to God.

What makes Del Toro's version especially interesting is that he tells the story from both sides. We see Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant and obsessive creator, but we also see the creature who is trying to understand what he is and why he has been rejected by the one who made him. Del Toro has always been drawn to creatures and outsiders, but here that perspective becomes central to the story. The creature is not simply a monster. He is a person-like being who longs to be known, loved, and accepted. He wants to understand his creator, and perhaps more than anything else, he wants his creator to love him.

That makes Victor's failure more than a scientific mistake. He does not merely create something and lose control of it. He creates a being and then abandons him. He wants the achievement of creation without the responsibility of being a creator. He wants to make life, but he does not want to love what he has made. In that sense, the story becomes almost a dark parody of the relationship between God and humanity. God creates, sustains, pursues, and ultimately enters His creation to redeem it. Victor creates and runs away.

But there is another side to the story, and I think it is just as important. Victor's problem begins before he abandons the creature. It begins with his desire to cross the boundary between Creator and creature. The Tower of Babel tells a similar story. Humanity does not fail because the tower is too tall. Humanity fails because it attempts to establish its own greatness apart from God. Babel is the continuation of the temptation in Eden: we will determine our own destiny, establish our own glory, and become like God.

Victor Frankenstein follows the same path. His problem is not simply that he experiments with science. Human curiosity and creativity are good things. His problem is that he begins to believe there are no boundaries to what humanity should be able to do. He reaches for the power of creation while forgetting that he himself is a creature.

That gives Frankenstein two warnings, and I think both are essential as we enter the age of artificial intelligence. The first warning is directed upward: Do not try to become God. We should be careful about confusing technological ability with divine authority. We may become remarkably good at imitating intelligence, manipulating matter, and building things that behave in astonishingly human ways. But the ability to make something complicated does not make us gods, and the ability to imitate consciousness does not mean we have mastered the mystery of personhood.

The second warning is directed outward: Do not fail to recognize the image of God in other people. The creature's tragedy is not only that he was created. It is that he was rejected because he looked different. Again and again, he reaches toward humanity and is treated as something less than human. That is a warning Christians should take seriously. Scripture gives us no permission to decide that someone is less worthy of dignity because they are different from us, frightening to us, inconvenient to us, or outside our particular group.

Victor fails in both directions. He reaches too high toward the place of God and looks too low upon the being in front of him. Perhaps that is why Frankenstein belongs in this series. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die asks what technology is doing to our attention. Companion asks what technology is doing to our relationships. Ex Machina asks what happens when humanity tries to create consciousness. Frankenstein takes the question deeper: What happens when we forget both who God is and who we are?

The Christian answer is not that we should stop creating, stop discovering, or stop developing technology. It is that we should remember that we are creatures before we are creators. We can build astonishing things without becoming God, and we can encounter people who are astonishingly different from us without denying their dignity. The story warns us not only against reaching too high, but against looking too low. We are not God. Neither are our neighbors. But they bear His image, and that should change the way we treat them.