Tony Stark vs. Victor Frankenstein and the Savior Complex

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is a text that is commonly taught in high school and college courses, but the ability to pick out the similarities taken from it and injected into our modern-day literature is something to commend. Frankenstein follows many aspects, the Savior Complex, Man and God, Antireligion, and unreliable narrators, all of which connect to a very popular movie of our time, Marvels, Avengers: Age of Ultron. Many critics claimed this movie as a subtle, modern retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The egotistical mad scientist (Tony Stark) and his creation (Ultron). Victor Frankenstein is motivated by ambition and wants great achievements even if these achievements come at a great cost. On the other hand, Stark creates Ultron, an Artificial Intelligence Peacekeeping Program, to operate independently to keep the world safe. Both scientists fail, and it is the ability to acknowledge this failure that tells their story. Tony Stark is our modern retelling of Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein that uses A.I. to create the “monster” to match our current knowledge of creation and science. 

Looking into the Marvel cinematic universe, everyone’s favorite “mad scientist” would have to be Tony Stark. The classic man who created a suit of armor to protect the greater good was Iron Man. Only, he could not stop here. Just like with Victor Frankenstein, Tony Stark was cursed with the Savior Complex. The Savior Complex, as defined by People Skills Decoded, is  “a psychological construct which makes a person feel the need to save other people. This person has a strong tendency to seek people who desperately need help and to assist them, often sacrificing their own needs for these people,”. In this instance, Tony Stark is attempting to create a defense against aliens, in hopes that it will help his planet in the future. As seen in prior Marvel Movies, and future marvel movies such as Infinity Wars and Endgame, Tony Stark is in constant desperate need to find something to fix and save, whereas Victor Frankenstein has convinced himself that the world needs to be saved from death itself.  Victor Frankenstein has found himself in a predicament, where he wants to help people escape death, due to his subconscious trying to bring his mother back and even prevent Elizabeth from death.

Tony Stark’s motives are often good but actions are bad and are the cause of most of the problems in the cinematic universe. Similar to Victor Frankenstein, the ego tends to guide him down the wrong path and make him believe that he is the hero in the story and not the villain. Victor is a perfect example of the term antihero. As described in Merriam Webster dictionary, an antihero is “a protagonist or notable figure who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities,”. A person who has the right intentions in mind, and heroic goals, but the inability to go through with them and create them without causing conflict. Ultimately making them one of the problems of their stories. Both Victor and Tony have this problem. The only difference between the two is though Tony won’t always own up to his mistakes, he will do everything he can to fix them, whereas Victor ignores them, and allows his ego to claim that the mistakes never happened in hopes that it would remove the problems from his life altogether.

In both stories, the outcomes are similar. Neither monsters that were created were killed. Normally, it would be the hero’s win, and the villain is defeated and everyone goes home happy. In Frankenstein, Victor passes away and the monster lives. In The Avengers Age of Ultron, Ultron’s body is destroyed, but his mind still lives on in the world’s computers. This brings us to the question of, who is the real “villain” in the story? A common question that is related to the Frankenstein book that makes the reader wonder, is Frankenstein’s Monster, really the Monster? Or the man who created it? Even the “monster” in Frankenstein considers killing himself for the greater good, being self-aware that he isn’t supposed to be there. Victor couldn’t bring himself to do so. The difference between Tony and Victor, in this case, is the ability to own up to mistakes and make them right. Who can remove their ego to allow a reflection over the greater good, than over themselves? Tony, in this case, always had the greater good in mind, and Victor was selfish, and only cared about how it would affect him.

Overall, Tony Stark and Victor Frankenstein are in more ways similar than different. All of the common aspects that came from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were a product of the creation of Ultron in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. The differences that are found are enough to change the outcomes of each story. Tony’s ability to understand that his creation of Ultron had failed, already placed him ahead of Victor in terms of fixing his mistakes. Victors ignoring his problems and inability to own up to his mistakes was a product in his demise. Where Victor is then made the monster of his own story, Tony is made the hero.