Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde is one of my top favorite bookS. Robert Louis Stevenson was a remarkable writer and I believe he truly changed how people perceived themselves. He made us realize of not the evil in the world, but the inner malice we all carry. The constant battle between the humane and the inhumane, the beast within a man. This also reminds me of my second favorite book Frakenstien by Mary Shelly. Both are remarkable stories that embody the definition of what a metaphor is. The battle between man and nature, and between good and evil.
I personally love the book more then the movie just for the fact on how the book portrayed evil and how the movie portrayed it. I understand it's hard to portray what is good and evil, especially in terms of Stevenson and in those terms to be successful to show it in film is a remarkable challenge. But I believe it would have been more remarkable and truthful if they had made it as Stevenson original embodiment. In the film they choice to have "women" as evil or temptation. His point wasn't about life's urges and temptations, those things are inevitable and happen to everyone. I strongly believed he focused on the will and interpretation of the good and bad. How the inner mind channels what to do and process how they should do it. That leads us into the two sides of human beings: a human and a decent human being. The quote from the book shows this!
“Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self”
It's clear here that it's in man. Not the temps of the world but in man himself in which he is destroyed.
However, the film was beautifully and carefully set, from the lighting between darkness and light. They also had the constant motif...