Angels and Demons

Angels and Demons (**1/2)

I don't profess to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every movie ever made, but I think I can say with confidence that Angels and Demons is the only movie ever made, or that ever will be made, in which the first scene is a funeral procession at the Vatican for the just-deceased pope, and the second scene takes place at the Large Hadron Collider (be careful how you spell that, by the way, or else it becomes a collider of something much different than super-fast particles). That's just the sort of movie this is though: a beat-the-clock suspense thriller that's chiefly concerned with setting up a big obstacle course for its hero to work his way through over the course of two hours so he can save everyone from the conveniently slow-activating bomb that's hidden in some undisclosed location. Of pretty much no concern is whether or not any of the specifics of how the hero accomplishes this make any sense whatsoever. If you're willing to suspend your disbelief throughout all of its silliness, its a fun ride that'll hold your interest for its 2 hour 20 minute run time. At the same time, it does have some major issues, and I don't know if it'll hold up all that well on repeat viewings.

As mentioned, the movie opens in Vatican City as the various rituals that accompany the death of a Pope are carried out, many of which seem to involve breaking all of the old Pope's stuff (the Ring of the Fisherman which the Pope wears is broken with a hammer). Then there's the Large Hadron Collider scene, where, in typical sciencey action movie fashion, a small vial containing a sustained bit of anti-matter (which apparently looks like a little purple cloud) is stolen from a super secret room with a retinal scanner at the door and a flashing red light to indicate that something is amiss. In what initially seems to be an unrelated incident, someone claiming to be part of the illuminati--the ancient anti-dogmatic, pro-science cult and long-time enemy of the Catholic church--has taken four preferiti, top candidates to be named the next Pope, hostage. One hostage is going to be executed at 8, 9, 10, and 11-o'clock, and then a bomb will be detonated at midnight which will destroy the Vatican, and a whole lot of Rome along with it. Surprise, surprise, the "bomb" is actually the anti-matter vial, which will cause a huge explosive reaction when the batteries of its containment field run dead. Apparently a regular old fashioned bomb isn't sciency enough for the illuminati. The Vatican dispatches a guy to find Robert Langdon, the character from The Da Vinci Code, the movie of which this is a sequel, played again by Tom Hanks. Langdon, a symbologist, agrees to come help after being shown a symbol with the word illuminati written in a fashion such that its the same right-side-up or upside-down which piques his interest. Also summoned to the Vatican is the alliteratively-named Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), a physicist who was the first to discover the Hadron Collider theft, along with the body of her dead father, who was killed in the process.

Langdon arrives on the scene at around 6:30 local time, roughly an hour and a half before the first Cardinal is going to be executed, yet for a good while he and everyone around him only seems to be in a moderate hurry. There's a lot of scenes of brisk walking, but not a lot of running until closer to the climax of the movie. There's time for Langdon to meet the rank and file of the Vatican police, who are divided as to whether or not an academic such as him is going to do any good. Langdon manages to get in a few jabs chastising the police and others around the Vatican for not knowing their history of Catholicism as well. Eventually, Langdon meets with the Camerlengo--essentially the interim pope--in his office, and convinces him to let him into the Vatican archives to search for clues to a cryptic message left in a video by the man claiming to represent the Illuminati holding the Cardinals hostage. At about 7:53, through a series of poetic riddles involving statues and other landmarks around Rome, Langdon thinks he's figured out where they have to go, and the Vatican police's magic drivers get Langdon and Vittoria halfway across Rome in about five minutes. This basic process is repated from the 8:00 hour until midnight, with a little bit more of the full picture of what's going on coming in place each time. Langdon genrally thinks out loud until he has a sudden revelation about where the next clue is, while Vittoria's job is generally to look hot and occasionally keep a running dialogue with Langdon as he throws out theories. Sometimes though, she comes up with something seemingly completely out of nowhere that she would seemingly have no reason to know as a physicist. Her character isn't really well developed, and there's a whole subplot involving journals her father kept that pretty much sputters out without producing anything significant. In the meantime, the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor) is arguing for the Vatican to be evacuated, but is rebuked by the Cardinal who's going to head up the conclave to choose the new Pope, who says it should continue.

As much as I've been poking fun at the movie to this point, I did generally enjoy watching it. I didn't see Da Vinci Code nor have I read either of the books, and I went to see Angels and Demons with friends with some trepidation, given what I'd heard about it and Da Vinci Code before. While some of the criticisms I'd heard are prominently on display, I have to say that I do appreciate the fun of its basic idea. The Vatican, with all its history and all of its domga, makes a perfect backdrop for this kind of a detective story, and the detective story did generally hold my interest. As much as I was weighing the plausibility of the whole thing in some part of my mind the entire time, I was also generally excited to find out where it was going to go from there. There is a big reveal at the very end, after the main plot that I've described to this point has been resolved, that I'm sort of mixed on. On the one hand, it was generally unexpected, at least to me. At the same time though, it does extend the movie for a while longer after the whole adrenaline rush of "are they gonig to find the bomb in time?!" has come and gone, and I also think it might be to clever by half. It completely changes your view of one particular person within the Vatican hierarhy, and I'm ultimately not sure if it actually made him a more compelling character afterwards than how he was presented beforehand. Beyond that, there isn't really a lot of depth to the movie that would warrant repeat viewings once you already know all the twists and turns. There are some brief moments where the subject of Langdon's agnosticism comes up with various members of the chruch, but they're just that, moments. In a movie that takes place pretty much entirely within the Vatican, there's not really a lot of deep thoughts into the nature of religion.

Really, I think the most interesting idea presented in the movie is the nature of the whole Illuminati plot and its organization. The whole idea is that the Illuminati are supposed to value science above all else, and their loathing for the Catholic church comes from its historical shunning of science in favor of what the Illuminati would consider completely arbitrary conditions that are often totally contradicted by science. And yet, as Langdon tells us throughout the movie as decyphering all manner of old texts and symbols, the Illuminati in many ways seem equally obsessed with ritual and symbols. Clues are hidden in churches that both form a cross shape on a map of Rome, and at the same time contain landmarks that are related what were once considered the four main elements of science: earth, water, air, and fire. Was this an intentional commentary by either Dan Brown or the filmmakers to argue that men of science and men of religion really aren't all that different, or is it merely a result of them wanting to make Robert Langdon's quest to save the Vatican as epic and complex as possible? I'm not really sure. Whatever. I had fun with the movie taking it at face value and, frankly, that's more than I thought I was going to get out of it.