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Guillermo del Toro tries so hard for grandeur in Frankenstein that he misses what always made the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley legend work. Del Toro over-scales the story of Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), who ventures to “conquer death” by reanimating assembled corpse pieces into a monster, though the result parodies his attempt to play God. Victor’s hubris stands before him as a ghastly creature (Jacob Elordi in tighty not-so-whiteys) embodying the nightmare of original sin, the grasp for knowledge that is exposed as out-of-control egotism.

Del Toro’s hubris takes the form of an overlong Netflix feature intended to flatter horror and sci-fi nerds with the artifice of respectability. Structured with a prologue set in 1857, followed by Victor’s narrative and then the monster’s, Del Toro’s movie begins with a premise — “Some of what I tell you is fact. Some is not, but it is all true” — intended to fascinate. But it’s merely a banal excuse for his usual generic specialty: macabre pseudoscience and outlandish violence that invoke childhood fears and hint at interspecies sex.

Victor’s perverse childhood shows him praying to a guardian-angel statue (his “dark angel”), suffering the loss of an eccentric mother and enduring abuse from his cruel physician father, who damns him: “Your face is vanity!” He rebels, questioning authority and indulging the profane arts. “The answer only comes when coaxed by disobedience, free of fear and cowardly dogma.” A syphilitic arms merchant (Christoph Waltz) funds Victor’s scientific experiment and has a kooky niece, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), who is captivated by the duo’s bizarre activities — converting a vast castle into a laboratory with a giant Medusa-head wall plaque and a phallic tower/antennae to harness electric energy. They toy with chemicals and body parts as memento mori art pieces, combining the kind of alchemy and necromancy that ghoulish children loved about Del Toro’s overwrought pseudo-political Pan’s Labyrinth.

Victor’s lab is Del Toro’s play world. It’s an obviously expensive, major effort, yet it’s persistently immature. It’s neither erotic nor supernatural enough to justify even a superficial interest in horror, which in any event never comes to grips with human nature (even while Del Toro quotes the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to appease Christopher Nolan pseuds). Del Toro trivializes profundity. After escaping Victor’s attempt to destroy him, the monster articulates his existential alienation: “I called your name and understood I was alone.” In an athletic, modern-dance performance, Elordi’s unnatural creature crawls through the woods, snatches an undertaker’s caped overcoat from a graveyard, and witnesses the cruelty of hunters who mistake him for “the Spirit of the Forest.”

This segment should unify Del Toro and Shelley’s conceits, but it’s unconvincing. It evokes previous Frankenstein movies yet lacks the drive and sense of narrativity that distinguished Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, still the significant cinematic updating of the literary fantasy.

Making a serious costume drama about adolescent fantasy, Del Toro loses the sense of pop that the Frankenstein myth has attained. Without Tim Burton’s comic sensibility, and in the wake of Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’s definitive parody, Del Toro is left to pander to market trends, exploiting the heresy that Shelley characterized so shrewdly. It’s not steampunk porn like Poor Things but differs from Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Coppola-produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein only as a deluxe nerd fantasy with old-fashioned roadshow movie sets and compositions. (The end-credits quote of Lord Byron is as inappropriate and blasphemous as Nia Costa’s ending Hedda with Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug.”)

Del Toro’s faulty sense of pop indicates a new problem: As a globalist nerd working outside the Mexican ethnic culture of Julián Hernández and Alonso Ruizpalacios, he has lost connection with the pertinent social issues seen in Asphalt Goddess, Gueros, and La Cocina. These might have helped update Frankenstein and express the millennium’s spiritual desperation — from contemporary religious conflict to the diabolism of gender mutilation immediately evoked by Victor’s body-horror experiments. Shelley’s metaphor inspired The New York Dolls’ great 1973 pop anthem “Frankenstein,” which addressed teenage self-absorption, self-image, and generation-gap unrest (“Bring a list of your demands!”) — that metaphor being so fecund that it in turn inspired the self-examination of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” But Del Toro’s filmmaking is forever childish. The New York Dolls and Michael Jackson gleaned more from Frankenstein than Del Toro will ever know.