1 post tagged “angels & demons”
Tackling a Dan Brown film adaptation on a critical level is akin to committing textual hari-kiri. Such folly to peek around the corpulent mass of worldwide receipts totalling over 700 million just to poke at the lifeless form of ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
What’s most amusing about the adaptation of the second in the Robert Langdon sequence is that it really should be the first. ‘Angels and Demons’ having been published before ‘The Da Vinci Code’. The grand revelation of Mary now coming before the events of this movie. An obvious retcon considering the huge success of the book, but a stupid one because it completely negates its efficacy.
When Langdon shares a joke over the revelation with a papal representative in the opening, it only cements the obvious: Dan Brown’s works are nothing more than potboilers. Never meant to stir up any controversy. Hardy Boys novels writ large and looking to the almighty dollar like any enterprising scriptwriter latching onto the new money-machine trend.
Their success is solely down to the ridiculous fervour generated by the media and subsequently by the first thousand readers who yawningly leafed through them at an airport bookstand. And of course it should be no surprise, then, that films based on pedestrian works will produce wholly pedestrian films.
Saying that, one of the few things this film does gets right, at least on the surface, is streamlining. Scripter Akiva Goldsman has clearly learned from the meandering debacle of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and cut much of the fat, conflated characters and reduced the role of the Hassashin to little more than hired Merc.
He’s also one of the best characters, and says very little. Unlike the rest of our cast, and specifically our lead.
Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon has to be one of the most impotent heroes in cinema. When he’s not giving us, I’m sorry, Dr Vetra (Ayelet Zurer, reduced to beautiful yet bland helper-heroine) impromptu lectures on the history, and much maligned with it, of the Catholic Church, he’s rushing around Rome like a more cavalier Simon Schama; failing miserably to save anyone. Not to say Hanks is bad. It’s impossible to hide that infectious wit and charm. It’s just as the focus of a movie, there seems very little reason for him to be there.
So desperate not to repeat the mistakes of the first film, and more probably an effect of the rush to complete the script before the Writers’ Strike, action takes centre stage. Our heroes facing off against an Illuminati threat that has, following the death of the Pope, planted an anti-matter bomb somewhere in the Vatican, taken the four papal candidates captive and threatened to kill them, one every hour. It’s up to Indiana Langdon to find them and prevent an explosion that could take out the Vatican and a large chunk of Rome with it.
It all sounds very exciting, and to the credit of director Ron Howard it very nearly is. His camera whipping from chapel to crypt, crypt to church; by car and on foot. Unfortunately, he does such a good job of the look of the film that, as each scene ends with failure, you start to appreciate it more as a very lush, evocative, but breathless travelogue.
‘If you’ll look to your left you’ll see a beautiful CGI recreation of the Pantheon and over there is the equally striking Santa Maria della Vittoria. Oh, please ignore those screams, that’s just a cardinal being burned alive. Now, moving on…’ Joking aside, on the visual side this film is superlative and for that the filmmakers should be commended highly.
It‘s a shame then, that amidst the increasingly deflating tension, the film feels the need to say something. And so we get softly spoken Camerlengo Patrick McKenna. And you have to pity poor Ewan McGregor who’d actually be quite commanding if it wasn’t for his faltering Irish accent and the string of sermons he has to give. One of them an excruciating speech, ostensibly calling for parity between religion and science, yet filtered through the usual patronising Catholic mandate.
These faults even manage to dim the glow of Howard’s success with ‘Frost/Nixon’. His decision to drench the film in obvious light/dark opposition and that heavy Catholic fear is one thing, but composing clumsy images as when Langdon tosses aside the white collar from a priest’s shirt is beneath him. There’s even the on-message appearance of a stem cell protest at the site of one of the murders.
On the other hand he also shows signs of continued improvement. In one spectacular image, rupturing the heavens themselves, and turning them into a tableau of the cosmos. In another he makes all the grinding talky-talk redundant, juxtaposing the potential of the LHC machinery with the smoke rising up through the Sistine Chapel chimney. Both objects that could communicate change for the good, as well as the bad. One of science. One of religion.
Unfortunately these successes are all but smothered by the interminable spat between the two disciplines. It’s left to the fine work by composer Hans Zimmer to lift the film, much as it was in the previous one. It’s the usual mix of choral blast, matching the Catholic darkness and pomposity onscreen, and moments of serene contemplation. Thanks to Zimmer the film is taken to heights it really doesn’t deserve.
